For all its brilliant complexity, the Milky Way is rather unremarkable as galaxies go. At least, that’s how Mark Vogelsberger sees it. “Our galaxy has a couple features that might be a bit surprising, like the exact number of structures and satellites around it,” Vogelsberger muses. “But if you average over a lot of metrics, the Milky Way is actually a rather normal place.” He should know. Vogelsberger, a newly tenured associate professor in MIT’s Department of Physics, has spent much of his career recreating the birth and evolution of…
