A Summer Spent Finding Our Galactic Twin

Today’s post is a guest post by A-level Student, Tim Buckman from Portsmouth Grammer School, who spent 6 weeks working with me at Portsmouth University this summer through the Nuffield Science Bursery Scheme.
Finding Our Galactic Twin
For millions of years humans have attempted to understand their place in the cosmos.
We went from the flat Earth to the globe; from a geocentric to a heliocentric solar system, and now we understand we live in the outskirts of a spiral galaxy – a massive collection of stars.
For years though astronomers have endeavoured to find out what The Milky Way, our home galaxy, actually looks like in detail. The difficulty lies in the fact that we live within it, and it would take thousands of years of travel to get a good photo opportunity. The best models suggest that our galaxy is a spiral galaxy with between two and four spiral arms, a central bulge and a bar at the centre. Using what data we have, artists have tried to create an impression of our galaxy’s structure and form, the best guess being the one below.
An artists impression of our Galaxy. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Robert Hurt (SSC-Caltech)

Recently, the ...