Celestia Forums

Has anyone noticed this...

Go position yourself at SMC

Centre the milky way in your view

And what you would see is clearly a Barred spiral galaxy...or atleat not the spiral galaxy that astronomers picture the milky way to be.

Is there an add-on for the "real" spiral?

Nothing wrong there.

Our home galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy, altough not a prominent one.

They found a second bar inside the other one.

http://www.obspm.fr/actual/nouvelle/nov01/alard.en.shtml

Brendan

While it is true that the Milky Way is a barred spiral, Celestia only provides a "placeholder" image. All of its spiral galaxies use the same model. The Milky Way, for example, is known to have at least four major arms and perhaps several smaller ones. The "placeholder" only has two spiral arms.

Hopefully a future version of Celestia will provide more control over the shapes of the galaxies that it draws.

Milky Way is probably very similar to galaxies such as NGC 3953 and NGC 7723. There's great map of Milky Way in an Atlas of the Universe site.