Today, almost all people on Earth are sure that in the Universe there are a huge number of star clusters - the so-called galaxies, one of which belongs to our Sun, which floats somewhere, as they say, in a galaxy called the Milky Way. On this basis, many people arguing about the Round Earth are actively mocking supporters of other points of view, citing "dogmas" about the plurality of galaxies.
However, none of these connoisseurs of "dogmas" most likely knows that the "dogma" of the multiplicity of galaxies was far from always and became such only 100 years ago, in 1920. Prior to that, the "dogma" of the 18th century model, authored by William Herschel, was considered more correct, according to which the Milky Way is the entire Universe.
This fact once again reminds us that the Big Space is nothing more than a newfangled theory and nothing more. In 1920, it was not Pithecanthropus who lived, but educated people and these people, it turns out, looked at space in a completely different way.
Nevertheless, the scientific world has been following the direction of new theories for a century and, within the framework of these theories, a group of astrophysicists from universities in Australia and China was puzzled by the construction of a three-dimensional model of the Milky Way.
The fact that the Milky Way is most likely a spiral similar to the spirals of all other spiral galaxies, astronomers seemed to have guessed, but they really wanted to look at this spiral as if from the side, for which the distances up to 1339 "standard" stars were measured as accurately as possible - so-called Cepheids.
The result of this study was a new 3D map of the Milky Way, an animated 3D map of the Milky Way and a drawing by an artist who, based on this map, depicted what the Milky Way looks like from the outside. All this was published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy in early February.
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As you can see from these images, our galaxy resembles a spiral no more than a vinyl record thrown into a frying pan. The second epic metaphor for astronomers was a tablecloth fluttering on a clothesline in the wind.
The fact that the Milky Five is slightly deformed, astronomers spoke several decades ago, since the gas and dust clouds located closer to the edges of the disk planes have serious deformations. However, now, having received, as it were, a three-dimensional model, we can talk about deformation more substantively.
This deformation turned out to be so great that it slightly amazed astronomers, since the new map suggests that stars rotate around the center of the galaxy along some unthinkable trajectory that contradicts all the equations of physics.
In this regard, the Milky Way, of course, is not a completely unique galaxy and there are other deformed galaxies, but only a couple of dozen of them have been discovered in the entire observable Universe. At the same time, their deformations are ridiculously small, forcing astronomers to think about gravitational lenses, which refract light and display an incorrect picture. So none of the Chinese and Australian academics knows how to explain such a deformation of the Milky Way.
At the moment, astronomers assume a version about "dark matter", which, apparently, was invented just for such cases. The Milky Way is said to have been caught in a vortex of this "dark matter", it is being torn to pieces, deformed and tomorrow we will all die.
It is possible, of course, that everything is so, because in the Apocalypse it is said that “the sky will roll up into a scroll”. However, another theory seems to us more correct, suggesting that the official distances to the stars are highly contrived.
These official distances are based on the so-called annual parallax - a change in direction towards an object (such as a star) associated with the movement of the Earth around the Sun. At the same time, without knowing the size of the Sun, it is impossible to measure the distance to it, so the distance to the Sun was measured based on the distances to the planets, which was also determined by a dubious formula.
The result of all these "definitions of distances by hyperlinks" was just the phenomenal mapping of the Milky Way, which for some reason turned out to be similar to a leaked vinyl disc. And the reason for this is the incorrect determination of the distances to the stars, on the basis of which such a map of the Galaxy was made, reminiscent of medieval portolans, where the coastline was drawn by the captains of the drakkars from the lantern.
So, probably, astronomers would be more correct to start revising the distances to objects, re-evaluating the size of the Milky Way and the Universe. If astronomers continue to run around with their "parallaxes", then we can argue: when figuring out the shape of the Metagalaxy (that is, the visible Universe), the academicians will have it in the form of a pyramid, parallelepiped or generally a cube.