Notes

One gets a rough idea of the shape of the Milky Way galaxy by just looking around--a ragged, hazy band of light circles the sky. It is about 15 degrees wide, and stars are concentrated fairly evenly along the strip. That observation indicates that our Milky Way Galaxy is a flattened disk of stars, with us located somewhere near the plane of the disk. A major breakthrough in moving the earth from the center of the galaxy to a point about 3/5 away from the edge came in the early decades of this century, when Harlow Shapley measured the distance to the large clusters of stars called globular clusters. He found they were distributed in a spherical distribution about 100,000 light-years in diameter, centered on a location in the constellation Sagittarius. Shapley concluded (and other astronomers have since verified) that the center of the distribution of globular clusters is the center of the Milky Way as well, so our galaxy looks like a flat disk of stars embedded in a spherical cloud, or 'halo,' of globular clusters.In the past 75 years, astronomers have refined this picture, using a variety of techniques of radio, optical, infrared and even x-ray astronomy, to fill in the details: the location of spiral arms, clouds of gas and dust, concentrations of molecules and so on. The essential modern picture is that our solar system is located on the inner edge of a spiral arm, about 25,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy, which is in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius.