So I’ve been watching a lot of video’s about how small we are compared to the universe. ( like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rrG5Nppaew&ab_channel=DANIELKAMARUZAMAN) ). And I don’t understand one thing. How do we know what our milky way looks like? And how do we know what the other millky ways look like?
In: Earth Science
“The Milky Way” is the name we give our galaxy. Other galaxies are not called “milky ways”. Just “other galaxies”.
We can discern the shape of our galaxy by plotting the distance and location of all the stars we can see within our area, and that gives us a good idea of what the shape is. Like looking around at the houses in your neighborhood and then drawing an aerial map from that information. It’s probably not perfect but gets us a good idea to work from.
And we know what other galaxies look like because we just look at them.
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