The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with the Schechter characteristic luminosity L*,thus an important anchor point of the Hubble sequence of all spiral galaxies.Yet the true appearance of the Milky Way has remained elusive for centuries.We review the current best understanding of the structure and kinematics of our home galaxy,and present an updated scientifically accurate visualization of the Milky Way structure with almost all components of the spiral arms,along with the COBE image in the solar perspective.The Milky Way contains a strong bar,four major spiral arms,and an additional arm segment(the Local arm)that may be longer than previously thought.The Galactic boxy bulge that we observe is mostly the peanut-shaped central bar viewed nearly end-on with a bar angle of^25°-30°from the SunGalactic center line.The bar transitions smoothly from a central peanut-shaped structure to an extended thin part that ends around R^5 kpc.The Galactic bulge/bar contains^30%-40%of the total stellar mass in the Galaxy.Dynamical modelling of both the stellar and gas kinematics yields a bar pattern rotation speed of^35-40 km s-1 kpc-1,corresponding to a bar rotation period of^160-180 Myr.From a galaxy formation point of view,our Milky Way is probably a pure-disk galaxy with little room for a significant merger-made,"classical"spheroidal bulge,and we give a number of reasons why this is the case.
We present a multi-line study of the massive star-forming region IRAS 22506+5944.A new 6.7 GHz methanol maser was detected.12CO,13CO,C18O and HCO+ J=1-0 transition observations reveal a star-formation complex consisting mainly of two cores.The dominant core has a mass of more than 200 M⊙,while the other one is only about 35 M.Both cores are obviously at different evolutionary stages.A 12CO energetic bipolar outflow was detected with an outflow mass of about 15 M⊙.
