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Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, makes for a pretty space picture, and it looks normal at a distance. But a new 3D map reveals a surprise: The Milky Way is being warped and twisted by its stars. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, in which stars and gas clouds exist mainly in its two spiral "arms." Our massive neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, is also a spiral. Spiral galaxies usually appear very flat and easy to see through a telescope, said the researchers behind the new map, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. Using 1,339 large, pulsating stars...

Scientists have discovered a planet more like Earth than any other found before, they said on Wednesday. It's 20,000 light-years away, just shy of the center of the Milky Way. The discovery, which the scientists called "groundbreaking," was made using a technique noted in 1912 by Albert Einstein through a network of telescopes positioned around the globe. The planet takes the nondescript name "OGLE-2005-BLG-390" after one such telescope, named OGLE, for Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment. OGLE, based in Poland's Warsaw University Observatory, was first used to spot the object on July 11, 2005. "This planet is actually the first and...