The University of Wisconsin Astronomy Department, using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, has announced that their latest star survey shows that the Milky Way apparently has a central bar.  There was suspicion of this previously, but the new survey adds evidence that we're living in a barred spiral galaxy, rather than an ordinary spiral.

The news item and an artists concept of the galaxy structure can be found at http://www.news.wisc.edu/11405.html

As I hope you know, this is a confirmation of information that's been known for years, not a new discovery. The 2MASS survey did quite a bit of work in that area, for example. A popularized summary published in 2002 is at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020223/bob9.asp





Edited by selden