Reimagining the Milky Way: A Revised Galactic Shape

A team of space scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences has found that the traditional view of the Milky Way galaxy as having four arms is not correct. They believe that, like most other galaxies, the Milky Way has just two main arms. The team used data from a new generation of space instruments, including the Gaia space observatory, to build a map of the Milky Way and fit the arrangement of stars to a spiral, finding that the most likely shape of the Milky Way is a barred spiral with two main arms that stretch outwards from the bar.