A Tourist's Guide Sat. A schematic shows the various regions of the Milky Way, seen edge-on. Galaxy NGC 1232, seen face on, is thought to look much like our Milky Way.
New stars continue to form along outer fringes of the spiral arms.
What a difference a couple of years makes What a difference a couple of years make. In the same time frame, astronomers have undergone a similar transition of thinking. Once looking far off into the deep black in search of answers to black holes, the big thinkers of space have returned, if not to Earth, at least to the cosmic backyard, solidifying the theory that there's a big ol' gravity monster just 26,000 light-years away, in the very center of our home galaxy. The revelation has researchers scrambling to study what is by far the closest black hole around. In seven separate articles in the January 7 issue of the journal Science , all of this new thinking is discussed.