From ScienceNOW’s The Milky Way Gets a Facelift: “Forget what you thought the Milky Way looked like. The galaxy is far from the simple and elegant spiral-armed structure so often portrayed. New observations, presented today at the 212th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis, Missouri, reveal, among other things, that…two of the galaxy’s four spiral arms are actually just small side-branches [and] the central bar of the galaxy turns out to be nearly twice as big as previously thought.”