It's hard to get a good view of our galactic home, not least because we're inside it. So how exactly do we know what we know about it?
HUMANITY has made great strides in probing the grand mysteries of the cosmos. We have observed the afterglow of the big bang, spied on galaxies so distant we see them as they were when the universe was an infant, monitored far-off supernova explosions and penetrated to the very edge of a black hole.
One corner of the cosmos, though, has proved resistant to our attempts to get to grips with it: the bit we call home, the Milky Way.
With the Milky Way, we are inside the thing we are trying to observe. We can only dream of zipping outside our galaxy in a spaceship to get another perspective. So we must make ...
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