An international research team has built the most in-depth 3D model of the Milky Way galaxy to date, using light from thousands of stars.

Their report, published today in Science, shows greater detail of the Milky Way’s “warp.”

“The problem astronomers have typically had in studying the Milky Way is that, because we reside in it, it is hard to see the parts that are far away — we cannot move outside the galaxy and look at it,” said Radek Poleski, co-author of the study and a postdoctoral astronomy fellow at The Ohio State University. “What we were able to do in this study that hasn’t been done before is to take a very large sample of objects — uniformly selected and organized — to build a model of the Milky Way galaxy.”

For years, astronomers thought the Milky Way was a disk-like spiral, with stars arranged in long, sloping branches, on one flat plane. Last summer, this team presented its findings to a group of astronomers, showing a slight warp in the galaxy, giving researchers their first indication that the galaxy might not be a perfectly flat disk.

The study published today shows more details: The warp, it turns out, is more pronounced than astronomers first believed.