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Our galaxy is a spiral with a bar across the middle, and we sit far out on one of its arms.

Astronomy Facts, sourced to NASA.

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What it means

Working out the shape from inside it is the hard part, rather like mapping a forest while standing in it. The evidence comes from tracking the motion of gas clouds and stars by the Doppler shift of their light. The sun lies about twenty six thousand light years from the center, in a minor arm, and takes something like two hundred and thirty million years to go around once. The last full lap began before the dinosaurs.

The claim comes from NASA.

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