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As per previous post on lack of progress in discerning our Galaxy's spiral structure:
- "fashion" is an important feature of professional astronomy; that propensity of researchers to flock towards, or away from, a specific research specialty......indeed it is way cool to be an extragalactic astronomer and not so cool to be a Galactic astronomer!
- I detect, in the scientific literature, a sort of "sinking feeling" that perhaps the spiral structure of the Milky Way may never be accurately characterized
- I get the sense from my reading of the literature that "it would be real nice to know what our Galaxy looks like if it were seen from above, but what does it matter anyway, as its spiral structure is only a sample of one object". So, comparative studies of various spiral galaxies seem to yield more insight and knowledge.
- there is no "clique" of astronomers who work together on spiral structure in the Milky Way. The complex social structure of cliques and research groups also drives research. (the "band of brothers" or the "band of sisters" effect; which of course can also have the negative side-effect of focusing a group too narrowly on an overspecialized research topic)
On the other hand, studies of the bulge component of our Galaxy are still sexy:
as there is that sense of mystery caused by the difficulty of the problem (e.g. dust and disk-component contamination in our line-of-sight ; the visual blandness of a spheroidal component which conceals a great inner complexity and a complex evolutionary history )
, and - observationally speaking - it is still easier to study the individual stars in our own Galaxy's bulge than it is to study the stars in the bulges of other galaxies.
cheers, mad galaxy man
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