I missed an update last week. No good excuse why; the holiday just threw me off schedule, I guess. Well, these are the last three pages of the chapter, so… enjoy!
Originally, Bellamy was going to be a “cleaner” for Intrasol: one of those creepy dudes who goes in after an assassination job and cleans up all the evidence. I ended up making him more of a lab rat type of character in part because I think it makes him more likable, and also because he's the closest thing to a 'Q' that Agent Six is going to have.
We can't actually see our own galaxy, because we're inside it, so all of our visual depictions of the Milky Way are just educated guesses. The popular representation of our home galaxy has been that of a majestic spiral galaxy (or, more specifically, a barred spiral galaxy), and more often than not it's depicted as a mirror image of our neighbor Andromeda. But it turns out our popular image of a “flat as a pancake” run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy is not accurate. A recent study by astronomers from Macquerie University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences used data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) to plot the first accurate 3D map of the Milky Way… and it turns out our galaxy is not flat at all; its disk is warped in sort of a sigmoid pattern.
Also, believe it or not, our galaxy has rings. No, I don't mean the spiral arms. The Milky Way is orbited by multiple rings made up of hundreds of millions of stars from smaller galaxies it's cannibalized over its lifespan. In addition to that, we're orbited by at least 20 smaller satellite galaxies – our galactic moons – and perhaps as many as 120 invisible “halo objects” composed entirely of dark matter. It's believed that one of these massive halo objects collided with the Milky Way about 100 million years ago, and the stars of our galactic disk still have a pronounced wobble to their orbits as a result of the impact.
It's also been believed for a long time that our sister galaxy Andromeda is the bigger of the two. But recent measurements suggest that, while Andromeda may be larger in terms of diameter and star count, the Milky Way is anywhere from equally massive to twice as massive. Also, while our galaxy is still probably smaller in size than Andromeda, it's not by as much as we once thought. For a long time, it's been estimated that our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, but more recent studies suggest that it is at least 170,000 light years across, and possibly as much as 200,000 light years across.
Hope you found that interesting; just some nerdy space stuff, so next time you do a comic about aliens invading our galaxy, you'll at least know not to draw Andromeda and call it the Milky Way.
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