For the first time, astronomers have seen the other side of the Milky Way in great detail. In research published today in Science, a team led by the Max Planck Institute used the Very Long Baseline Array to peer beyond the dust and map out an entire arm of the Milky Way spiral.

"With this measurement, we are showing that we are essentially able to map the whole extent of our Galaxy," says Alberto Sanna, lead author of the paper and an astrophysicist at Max Planck.

The space between stars in our galaxy is filled with dust. This dust and the bright center of our galaxy obscures the other side of the Milky Way from us. As a result, it's easier to make out other stars in nearby galaxies than some in our own.

Our galaxy has two arms that twist out and intertwine. We sit within the Scutum-Centaurus Arm, but portions of our arm are obscured by this interstellar matter. We know what our galaxy looks like based on how it behaves compared to other galaxies, but have never been able to map it out on our own.

The team also has made record breaking measurements of parallax, a term that, boiled down, means a measurement of distance between objects in relation to each other.

"The previous record for a parallax measurement was nearly 36,000 light-years, but we have measured a distance of more than 66,000 light-years to a star-forming region on the opposite side of the Milky Way from the Sun, well past the Galaxy's center," Bassa says."So, we have about doubled the previous record!"

To be fair, the results so far are a bit … fuzzy. But that's the point. Up to now, it's been hard if not impossible to look through the dust. This mapping scheme took advantage of giant clumps of hot gas up to the size of a small solar system that were easily "tuneable" in radio astronomy via microwave frequencies. By opting for these objects, rather than stars, they were able to understand the structure of our galaxy, even if the rest of the Delta Quadrant is still a relative mystery.

"A major problem with optical light is that it is heavily absorbed by interstellar dust, which isdistributed across the Galactic plane, so that radio observations are our most powerful "window"to those far regions in the Galaxy," Bassa says.

Future studies may be able to make out individual stars and planets. For now, we'll have to settle for hot gas cloudites instead.

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