I don’t know about you, but my image of the milky way galaxy always been one where spiral arms extend out from a luminous, bulging saucer of stars and gas with a massive black hole at it’s epicentre. A stable, spinning This has been the visual portrayed through textbooks, magazines and documentaries over the course of my life and I never really thought that something so ingrained in my psyche would ever be overturned so dramatically.

Well take a seat at the Mos Eisley Cantina and drink in this amazing new view of our Milky Way Galaxy! Overwhelming evidence has confirmed that the centre of our galaxy is not a bulging rotating disk, but a bar or rod that matches the rotation of the galaxy! Click the image above to get a better view … while you’re looking at the image imagine the centre bar is spinning on it’s own axis like a toilet paper roll while the roll itself also turns head over feet with the rest of the galaxy. The visual image in my head is one of a great gyroscopic Newtonian steampunk engine providing power to the Milky Way Galaxy, twisting and spewing out stars in spiral formation …

For more information I’d recommend starting with a concise summary by backyard astronomer and blogger Ray Sanders, while Space.com has a more detailed account of the findings.

Marc “Skinnyhead”