Transcript: The sky is not the same in all directions. The Milky Way is a band of stars and gas and obscuring dust that encircles the entire sky. Away from the direction of the Milky Way the stars are more sparsely scattered. Even the Milky Way is not the same in every direction. There’s a greater concentration of stars in the southern sky near the constellation of Sagittarius. A long time ago it was realized that the distribution of stars might give a sign as to the shape of the galaxy we inhabit. In 1750 the English theologian Thomas Wright speculated that the Sun was just one member of a huge slab-like arrangement of stars. German philosopher Immanuel Kant had the same idea at a similar time, and by the late eighteenth century several people had realized the Sun may be part of a large disk of stars.