Why We've Never Seen the Milky Way We Live In

Every picture of the Milky Way you've ever seen has one thing in common: it was never taken. No camera, no spacecraft, no human has ever seen our home galaxy from the outside. So why can't we photograph the one galaxy we actually live in? In this episode of The Hidden Why, we follow the answer from the scale of the galaxy, to the Sun's quiet suburb in the Orion Spur, to the cosmic dust that hid the true shape of the Milky Way for centuries. Then we look at how infrared, radio waves and Gaia's measurements of nearly two billion stars finally let astronomers map it from the inside, and what an artist's reconstruction really is. In this video: • Why Voyager 1, after almost 50 years, hasn't even gone one light-day • Where we actually sit in the galaxy, and how fast we're moving • How Galileo, Herschel and Shapley slowly worked out our place in it • How dust blocks visible light (and the "Zone of Avoidance") • How infrared and the 21-centimeter radio line see through the dust • The supermassive black hole at the center, and the first image of it • Real observations versus artistic reconstructions CHAPTERS 0:00 Welcome 0:06 The picture you know 0:23 It's not a photograph 0:40 Why not our own galaxy? 0:59 A problem of scale 1:19 Voyager and the distance to nowhere 1:58 Where are we in the galaxy? 2:21 We're moving, too 2:44 Inside a flat disk 3:11 The forest problem 3:29 Galileo and Herschel 3:55 Cosmic dust 4:38 The Zone of Avoidance 4:56 Shapley finds the center 5:27 The dust's weakness 5:47 Infrared vision 6:18 Radio waves and hydrogen 6:43 Mapping the hidden arms 7:03 The black hole at the heart 7:31 Gaia and parallax 8:01 A portrait built from measurements 8:33 Why the map is still debated 8:51 The answer 9:12 Our home, seen from within 9:24 Maybe one day 9:38 Thank you If you enjoyed this, subscribe to The Hidden Why for more questions hiding beneath things we think we know. #MilkyWay #Astronomy #Space #Galaxy #TheHiddenWhy Image and footage credits: NASA, ESA, Gaia, Spitzer, Hubble, Chandra, ALMA, ESO and the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration. Add the exact credits from your source files here.