Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a beautiful barred spiral galaxy, but we will never see what it looks like from the outside. It is too big, and we are too deeply inside it. This limitation results in some large uncertainties about the detailed structure of our place in the universe. A new method to map our galaxy "from the inside out" aims to fill these gaps. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The current best map of the Milky Way was produced by the European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory, which was retired earlier this year . Its full data set is still being analyzed, and the best is clearly yet to come . The new work uses a combination of the third data release and spectroscopic analysis from the European Southern

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