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Imagine that you were inside a large office building. Quick, what does it look like from the outside? That's basically why. While nearly all the individual stars we can see are in the Milky Way galaxy, we can only see a small fraction of them and being inside it, with dust clouds getting in the way (we can't even see, visually, the center of the galaxy, because of all the dust), it's kind of hard to tell what the overall shape is.

Now, to put things into perspective: when we say that we're "not certain" of the shape, what we really mean is fine detail. Just as if you were in the central courtyard of the Pentagon, you could be pretty sure that the building is pentagonal, the chances of the Milky Way NOT being a spiral galaxy are so close to zero as to be indistinguishable from it in any practical sense, and we're pretty sure it's a barred spiral. Exactly how many arms and how many times they wrap around ... that we can't really tell, but the gross structure is pretty nearly a dead lock.

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