File talk:4 Milky Way (ELitU)-blank.png

Which representations of the Milky Way are appropriately accurate and useful?

During our lifetimes the quality of astronomical imagery has improved by orders of magnitude. On the other hand, external views of our galaxy, the Milky Way, are necessarily representations constructed using the best available information at the time, which is gradually improving. It is now generally accepted that our galaxy is in the process of accreting several dwarf galaxies that are in varying degrees of disintegration but there doesn't appear to be agreement on which qualify, let alone an agreed representation of what this might look like from outside, so it is very much work in progress. Similarly, there are arguably several different representations that would be useful, one being the flattened view of an imaginary observer far above the galactic North pole, another being the view from our nearest large neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy. Should the Canis Major Overdensity be accepted as a dwarf galaxy then a further a representation of the Milky Way as observed from the Canis Major Overdensity would become relevant. Thus, there is no suggestion that there should be a single version of the truth that we should strive for on Wikipedia to the exclusion of all others, rather that fidelity and utility go hand in hand with context.

This discussion has been started on this page as the representation would appear to fall a long way short of other representations already available on Wikipedia, in particular those that represent it as a barred spiral galaxy and those that depict its arms and their spurs authentically. A heavily annotated representation such as this map would perhaps not be appropriate in the context of this page but the improvement in fidelity is readily tangible and it could be argued that any representation that does not at least depict the barred structure may be considered obsolete. Sandvika (talk) 11:15, 4 August 2022 (UTC)