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”
It seems that some atheists have taken their love of the FSM one step too far.
Every once in a while something gets me excited enough to get off the couch and start writing. ( It’s been over 2 months since my last confession, father ) Usually it has something to do with space, cause lets face it … I’m a huge space geek.
If you’ve ever tried to view meddlingkids.org on your mobile, experienced the horror and then quickly decided against it, you may want to try again.
Jim’s post on the 
We here at MK have been getting a little riled up over recent events where Islamic extremism seems to be taking a foothold in the western world. We tend to get a little grumpy when people start declaring that human rights are meaningless and the world should be under the rule of religious bigotry.
Remember when the Moon was just a barren rock floating mysteriously above us, Mars was a place where LGM (Little Green Men) plotted their earth invasion, and most of the news you heard about other galaxies was delivered by Jean Luc Picard? When I was a kid “The Universe” was just a vast unknown place where i could let my vivid but un-informed imagination run free. Man we’ve come a long way. Humanity has confirmed the presence of vast amounts of life-giving water on the Moon and Mars, and are expecting to find water on Saturn’s most famous moon, Titan. Since life seems to develop and thrive in even the most treacherous of Earth’s environments, the presence of water on other planets/moons has the scientific community expecting to find evidence of life on another planet very soon.