Paper: https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2026/04/aa58144-...
First sentence in the article: "Astronomers have located the edge of the Milky Way’s star-forming disk for the first time"
Wouldn't you expect someone from a publication called "Sky & Telescope" to know that these two are different things?!
Also, in diagrams showing our galaxy, I would greatly appreciate a "you are here" marker which points out the location of our solar system...
What would that mean?
Try locating France on this map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:T_and_O_map_Guntherus_Zin...
It's easy enough to take the rob74 position of "I'm going to choose an arbitrary point on this artist's conception and paste a 'you are here' sticker over it", but what would be the point?
> Disk galaxies like the Milky Way form stars “inside-out” — starting from the center and working outwards through the disk. So, as a general rule, the farther out astronomers look, the younger the stars are.
Suppose now that you're an ant on the middle ring of that tree stump. No matter which way you're looking from Earth's middle-ring, either the rings will get gradually older and then younger with increasing distance (if you're looking towards the center-ish), or the rings will get strictly younger (if you're looking away from the center-ish).
This analogy obviously breaks down if you delve into details but that should give a better intuition to what's going on.
The earth is not the center of the galaxy
> So, as a general rule, the farther out astronomers look, the younger the stars are.
I agree that the phrasing can be confusing.
Or did ie dark matter/energy somehow coalesce on the outer edge later? Milky way is supposed to be very old place, almost as old as universe itself so one would expect more homogeneous distribution, at least as a layperson.
It seems that you need quite large concentrations(as in scale of whole universe average) to actually get to star formation. Otherwise stars would be uniform trough the universe.
Then again I am not astronomer.