Seems we weren't quite right about the Milky Way.

Last year we learned that our home galaxy is bigger than we imagined, and now comes word that its shape isn't quite what many have believed it to be. Instead of being a mostly flat spiral disk of stars and gas, new research by astronomers in China and Australia shows that the Milky Way is significantly warped at its edges.

"We usually think of spiral galaxies as being quite flat, like Andromeda, which you can easily see through a telescope," Richard de Grijs, an astronomer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and a co-author of the paper describing the research, said in a statement. The paper was published Feb. 5 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

We’ve all seen photos of distant galaxies. But there’s no way to take such a photo of the Milky Way because our solar system and all the space probes we've ever launched lie within it — along a finger of stars known as the Orion Spur.