Locating our planet on the galactic map wasn't a breeze. 🌌 Engineering
If you were to take a test right now, would you be able to find yourself on a map of your city? Your country? A map of the world? Many of us probably could, but what if you didn't have a map to work with?
"Finding one's location in a cloud of a hundred billion stars—when one can't travel beyond one's own planet—is like trying to map out the shape of a forest while tied to one of the trees," said And given our propensity to put ourselves at the center of everything, figuring out where we really are can be more challenging still. But techniques passed down through time have given us a useful set of tools that have helped us map the stars and find our place in the cosmos.
During the Scientific Revolution, astronomers were able to determine that the stars in the night sky weren't fixed points on a celestial sphere that marked the boundary of the universe, but other suns like our own located at incredible distances from us.We didn't know that there were even galaxies.
Knowing that ours is a spiral galaxy like Andromeda and countless others we've discovered in the night sky over the years, we had a good template to work with for building out a rough map of the Milky Way. But how did we figure out where we were on that map?A panoramic view of the Milky Way galaxy, as much as we can see of it anyway. Source: Figuring out where we are in a spiral galaxy is definitely more difficult than knowing that we were in a spiral galaxy, but it isn't impossible.
"Shapley concluded that the center of the distribution of globular clusters is the center of the Milky Way as well," Marschall said,"so our galaxy looks like a flat disk of stars embedded in a spherical cloud, or 'halo,' of globular clusters.