X Marks the Spot: Twitter-Born Collaboration Illuminates Milky Way Structure

In May 2015, astronomer Dustin Lang posted some new maps of the Milky Way galaxy to Twitter. The post sparked the interest of Melissa Ness, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, who noted that the images provided a clear view of an X-shaped distribution of stars in the galaxy's central bulge. The Milky Way, which houses Earth's solar system, is a barred spiral galaxy, meaning the stars and gas clouds in the inner region form a bar shape, whil