If we're part of the Milky Way, how do we know what it looks like?

The galaxy doesn't have walls, dumbass.

Nothing that Trump couldn't fix, perhaps.

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That's like saying if you're inside a house you know what the outside looks like.

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if you had a very long pole with mirror on it and probably see it just fine

Dude, it’s puff puff pass.

Stop Gandalfing that pipe.

Cucumbers taste better pickled

Fun fact: on the clearest of nights your naked eye can only see about one millionth of 1% of all of the stars in the Milky Way.

I'm gonna have to pass this one to Shaq.

Selfie stick, obviously

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If we're part of the Milky Way, how do we know what it looks like?

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We don't but we have a pretty good idea. We think ours is a barred spiral galaxy but we aren't certain how many arms it has. It could be two, three or even four.

We know there's a massive black hole at the center and that it takes more than 100,000 years for light to travel across the galaxy's expanse. New estimates are around 160,000 lightyears.

The estimate for the number of stars in the Milky Way vary wildly but the most common statistic is about 100 billion.

We're some 26,000 lightyears from the center of the galaxy. That's why it's so difficult to see its shape. From our position near the plane of the rotating Milky Way, there's simply too many stars and dust blocking our view.

Because we asked other extraterrestrials