August thunderstorms are sweeping across Wisconsin tossing off multiple tornados. In our neighborhood in Madison there are a couple brief periods of intense rain but actually very little wind. Twenty miles southeast, however, a very large twister has destroyed houses near Stoughton. Lola and I watch the television and the windows recalling how we stood in the garage two Junes ago watching another tornado land half a mile away. I still keep pieces of debris from that afternoon in the office.
Every now and then it is useful to step back and put everything in perspective. Courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Departments of Astronomy and Physics: You Are Here.
A New Look for the Milky Way: The Milky Way, it turns out, is no ordinary spiral galaxy. According to a massive new survey of stars at the heart of the galaxy by Wisconsin astronomers, including professor of astonomy Edward Churchwell and professor of physics Robert Benjamin. "To date, this is the best evidence for a long bar in our galaxy," says Robert Benjamin of the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater.Apparently there is no monster twirling twisting suck everything inside black hole in the middle of our home galaxy. Instead, the guys from Wisconsin find a bar. How fitting.
A Bar at the Heart of the Milky Way: Using NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope to sample light from some 30 million stars in the Milky Way, astronomers observed a long bar of relatively old stars spanning the center of the galaxy. … The feature is some 27,000 light-years long (7,000 light-years longer than expected) and sits at a 45-degree angle to the galaxy's main plane.
Galactic survey reveals a new look for the Milky Way: The task, according to Churchwell, is like trying to describe the boundaries of a forest from a vantage point deep within the woods: "This is hard to do from within the galaxy."
