Spherical but not too sphere

By: Khat Tu Listiwa

“Our galaxy is obviously not flat!” say my friend. Then he gave me a picture of the Milky Way, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope (see the picture below).

From the picture above, an all-sky plot of the 25000 brightest, whitest stars shows how these stars are concentrated along the Milky Way. This map shows our limited, inside view of the Galaxy. The large, dark patch near the middle of the picture is due to nearby dark nebulae in the constellations of Aquila and Ophiuchus.

We can see also from the picture above that the shape of our galaxy seems having the similarity to our own globe. Spherical but not too sphere.