New header “Look Up” in honor of the space spies who made an awesome, new discovery last week.

Remember when like, waaaay back in the beginning of Novemember 2011, when we all were pretty sure the Milky Way looked like this?

Surprise!

It really looks like this:

“What we see are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic centre,” said Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who first recognised the feature. “We don’t fully understand their nature or origin…”

When the leader of the Harvard team responsible for the discovery is reduced to an elementary summary like this:

“They’re big,” said Doug Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, leader of the team that discovered them; the New York Times draws an analogy to Jabba the Hut, and “Wow,” is what David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton who was not involved in the work had to say…You know something jaw dropping has happened.

50,000 LIGHT YEARS OF HOT PINK. Almost as big as the entire galaxy, but completely unsuspected until now. If this doesn’t make us regret the decision to cancel our radical shuttle program, nothing will.

All images and videos from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

See, you can convey complex emotions with a well-timed stuffed animal.

made by kropserkel

via senoritapurti.