Question: what dous the milky way look like

Nick Wright answered on 21 Mar 2014:

Great question, and an important question too! Its not easy to work out what something looks like when you’re inside that thing (after all we don’t know what we look like unless we have a mirror).

So scientists have tried to use lots of different methods to work out what the Milky Way might look like from the outside, by studying all the components on the inside (stars, gas, star clusters) and also by studying other galaxies that we think we might look like.

Our best guess is that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy (we think we can see the spiral arms from the inside) and we think we either have two or four spiral arms (though its hard to count them all from the inside). Some scientists have put together a picture of what they think the Milky Way might look like from the outside, and this is what it might look like:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/20080603a.html