This is CBS I in the World. I'm John Batchew with Dr. Ken Croswell. He is reporting for the

proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. New thinking about our beautiful spiral galaxy,

the Milky Way. Yes, it's true. We're headed to Andromeda, which is also a beautiful

galaxy. We're going to emerge, but right now, the revelations about our galaxy include

our place in it, the sun. We're going around. It's going to take to earn 30 million years.

But in the meantime, we're part of a local arm, which is constantly being upgraded.

Ken, how is it that they now know the local arm extends?

What did you report?

26,000 light years.

How did this discovery get made?

And what does it mean?

Well, it's a good deal longer than a lot of people had thought.

26,000 light years is approximately the same distance between the sun and the galactic center.

Okay, so it's a substantial distance, and it could be longer than that.

You know, 26,000 is really just the minimum.

In terms of how we learned that, it was these mazer parallaxes that establish that certain stellar nurseries, certain young stars that

had been thought to be in the Perseus arm, which is the next arm outward, actually were closer

and were part of the local arm instead.

And these new observations from the Gaia spacecraft confirmed that.

So we've got two different indications, both from the radio observations and the optical

observations, that the local arm is quite a bit longer and more vigorous than have been thought.

And in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which you'll see a very beautiful

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