The good people working with the Spitzer space telescope have made a huge discovery. Spitzer sees in a number of bands of the infrared spectra some of which have never been possible to explore before. Our atmosphere absorbs a large chunk of the infrared spectra- specifically microwaves.

Spitzers position high above our atmosphere allows it to see and explore things that human eyes simply can not and have only now begun to have the ability to explore.

Our understanding of our own home galaxy is tenuous at best. From inside the galaxy, it is difficult to tell the shape and for of the galaxy as it would appear from the outside. We've known for some time that our galaxy is a spiral. We can see the spiral arms with optical astronomy.

For many years when astronomers have looked for a model of our galaxy, they would very likely cite M31 or the Andromeda galaxy.

Andromeda is a big, well behaved spiral galaxy relatively close and easily observable from earth.

The discovery that is probably going to boot Andromeda's place in the textbooks is the Milky Way's Bar. A galactic bar is a feature found in young spiral galaxies and is thought to be caused by instability caused by uneven mass distribution. As a barred spiral ages, this feature slowly disappears and the spiral begings to look more like our old friend the Andromeda galaxy.

This is our new vision of the galaxy and our new found bar.

So what is our new galactic model? Here's NGC 1300 which will probably replace Andromeda as the galaxy that most looks like the Milky Way as we now understand it.