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Pictured here: Moai under the Milky Way at Ahu Tongariki, Easter Island. Astronomers who study the growth and evolution of galaxies would seem to have an advantage over colleagues who study such topics as black holes or the Big Bang. After all, our sun, considered a fairly typical star, is a member of the Milky Way—a fairly typical spiral galaxy.
And as a fairly typical galaxy, the Milky Way should serve as an example for the general study of the growth and development of galaxies throughout the universe. However, observing a galaxy from the inside out is not an easy task. Even a comprehensive census of stars in the Milky Way has been beyond our reach, with much of the stellar population consisting of small, faint, hard-to-see red dwarf stars, while many stars are hidden by vast clouds of dust. Creating a 3-D map of the Milky Way has also proven difficult, and any details such a map could give us about galactic structures or stellar associations remains beyond our reach. Even the question of whether the Milky Way has four spiral arms or two has only been settled in the last few years.Image credit: Anne Dirkse
