Proud parents chart the growth of their children, but astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have taken on a bigger task: charting the growth of our own Milky Way. The researchers mapped the Galaxy by observing red giants, bright stars in the final stages of their lives that can be observed out to large distances from our Sun, into the very inner and outer reaches of the Milky Way. The team started with spectra taken from one of the SDSS's component surveys, the Apache Point Observatory Galaxy Evolution Experiment (APOGEE). "APOGEE is the ideal survey for this work becau...