Boobah: Don’t put too much confidence in that map of the Milky Way. It is merely at present best guess, and it is also much too neat to be real.

The Sun has fortunately been traveling in a relatively quiet region, dubbed the local bubble, for a very long time, which has prevented us from experiencing more extinction events coming from beyond the solar system. It sits inside an arm, but on its edge.

And while I’d known the Milky Way had a bit of a bar, I’d thought the spirals were fewer but wider. Which might explain why I thought Sol was in one of those wider arms.