"It was simply the most fantastic image of the Milky Way bulge that I had seen," Ness said. It looked like a 3-D football in comparison to the flat disk of the Milky Way. The Milky Way is a rotating barred spiral galaxy full of stars, gas and dust that is 100,000 light-years wide. "I don't normally study Milky Way structure, so it was fun to learn how the WISE data could be used to answer a question I didn't even know existed! But the Milky Way hasn't merged with another large galaxy in billions of years.

Source: CNN July 21, 2016 12:45 UTC