This resculpting actually makes the Milky Way 'less weird', says Gail Zasowski, an astronomer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The stars and other components of the Milky Way seemed more compact than those of galaxies similar to ours that scientists have been able to see and measure directly. The measurements made our Galaxy look 'cute and small' in comparison, Zasowski says, 'but you get a little suspicious' about why it is different. Zasowski and her colleagues made their Galactic revision by measuring the locations and distances of almost a quarter of a million red giants ' massive old stars ' using survey data from the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE). Normally, light from celestial bodies such as red giants can be obscured from the view of telescopes on Earth by interstellar dust, but the Apache observatory, in Sunspot, New Mexico, can detect near-infrared wavelengths, which pass through the dust. The researchers reported their...
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