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Since this is my first blog entry here at Share, I might as well make it interesting at least for those who like to think... a lot! So here goes...

They have wondered Is the Universe Birefringent? for over a decade, but now thanks to Spitzer providing us with an infrared map of the Milky Way it seems that Two of the Milky Way's Arms Go Missing.

And as quoted way down near the bottom of the last link from above:

Though galaxy arms appear to be intact features, stars are actually constantly moving in and out of them as they orbit the center of the Milky Way, like London commuters in a busy traffic circle. Our own sun might have once resided in a different arm. Since it was formed more than 4 billion years ago, it has traveled around the galaxy 16 times.

If the theories behinds this quote were to be true all the galaxy arms would have become completely disrupted before they even had time to form. What I believe we are actually witnessing is Frame-Dragging on very large scales of spacetime and its happening with all rotating galaxies, and its this frame-dragging that keeps all the star systems born within, residing within the arms they were born while orbiting around these rotating galaxies. The apparent orbital speed may make it to appear that star systems would leave the arms of galaxies but its this large scale frame-dragging which is being overlooked presently, and is actually keeping everything quite tidy on galactic scales.