Hello This is my first post and excuse me I'm a bit dim (hence my username). So, I've had this question rattling around in my head for a while... There are a lot of pictures of so called "Spiral Galaxies" and according to Wikipedia the taxonomy of galaxy shapes was described by Edwin Hubble in 1936. My question is if the astrophysics community really considers them spirals, or is that just something they use when talking to us layman? I ask this because it seems to me that the spiral shape is an artifact of how we view the galaxy from distance, not that the matter is distributed as in the picture. If you look down on to a planar disc from a great height then it will take x amount of time for photons to reach the observer. It will take a greater time for photons further from the center of the disc (hypotenuse of a triangle and all that good stuff) to reach the observer. At galactic diameters, these distances will have a considerable effect on how the resulting image is received. A photon from the very edge of a galaxy may well have taken thousands of years extra to arrive at our observatory here on earth compared to one at the center of the galaxy. So, I suggest that what we see as a spiral galaxy could actually be just a single point with a couple of jets and the whole thing is rotating. We would see a spiral shape when actually it could be just a rotating X shape. Can someone please shed some light on this as it's been bugging me for a long time. thanks!