• Question: how do we know what the milky way looks like if we are in it?

    Asked by h3llo to Gemma on 22 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Gemma Sharp

      Gemma Sharp answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      Good question.

      The short answer is “I have no idea”, but because I’m nice and helpful and stuff I’ve done a bit of Googling and come up with this:

      Basically, we don’t *really* know. those pictures you see of the milky way are images of how astronomers think it probably looks, not actual photos. There are awesome photos taken of the milky way from Earth though:

      As far as I can tell, astronomers know what other galaxies look like because they’ve used really advanced teloscopes to look at them. Then they’ve estimated what our galaxy might look like by measuring the distance between the stars we can see and stuff.

      The top answer on this page gives a really good analogy of how astronomers have done it: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100827181445AAKaeWg

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