** Science

Turns out that the Milky Way is probably a bar galaxy. I believe that this is relatively big news, at least in terms of Astronomy.

The caption to an artist's rendering of the Milky Way as bar galaxy is fairly hysterical. It says that the bar feature distinguishes the Milky Way from "from pedestrian spiral galaxies". Why do we feel like we need to distinguish our galactic structure to make us feel special? Feeling galactically insignificant these days?

Come to think of it, the term "Milky Way" is pretty weird, no?
- posted by David @ 9:42 AM