What is the Milky Way?
THE MILKY WAY The Milky Way is the name of the galaxy in which our earth, with all the other members of the solar (sun’s) family, is located. In other words, our galaxy is enormous in size. Its diameter is about 100,000 light years. A light-year is a distance that light travels in a period of one year. It is equal to 946 trillion kilometers. The Milky Way is made up of about 100,000 million stars and huge clouds of gas as well as dust. Each of these clouds along with the stars in it is called a nebula. Because of the dust and the gas, the light of the stars appears to be faint. The name Milky Way refers to the portion of the galaxy that can, be seen as a broad milky band of starlight across the sky on clear starry nights. This name was given by ancient Greeks who believed that it was formed by the drops of milk that dripped from the breasts of goddess Hera–wife of Zeus, chief of the gods. We, in India, call it Aakash Ganga while the Arabians call it Kahkashaan. The Milky Way is a spir
The Milky Way is a cluster of stars bound together by gravity in the shape of a spiral. This type of arrangement of stars is known as a galaxy. Many people are familiar with the concept of the Milky Way, since it hosts our own solar system on one of its spiral arms. During especially clear conditions, the Milky Way is visible as a faint band of light in the sky. The stars in this band of light stretch across hundreds of thousands of light years to collectively form our galaxy, which is merely one among billions in the universe. The name was directly lifted from the Latin via lactea, which means “Milky Way.” It is probably a reference to the appearance of the galaxy in the night sky, since it does look rather like a large puddle of spilled milk. The fact that the Milky Way was an interconnected system of stars was posited as early as the 1750s, when observers realized that the white blur in the sky was actually composed of millions of stars. Astronomers who have studied the origins of t
The Milky Way is a galaxy, a slowly rotating cluster of more than 200 billion stars! It is one of many galaxies in our universe. What is a galaxy? Galaxies are large collections of stars, gas and dust. They may have millions to billions of stars, all held into a cluster by gravitational attraction to each other. Most galaxies are flat, but there are different shapes — some are spirals, some are elliptical, and some are irregular. What does the Milky Way look like? Our Milky Way galaxy looks a little like a pinwheel. It is a spiral galaxy, about 100,000 light years across, with a bulge in the center (called the nuclear bulge) that contains the nucleus, a wide, flat disk with distinct spiral arms, and a surrounding halo of stars. There are several “spiral arms” in our Milky Way: Sagittarius, Cygnus, Perseus, and Orion. Our solar system is located at the inner edge of the Orion arm. Our galaxy slowly spins and our solar system spins with it. Our solar system takes about 250 million years
The Milky Way is the galaxy in which we live. It is a spiral shaped galaxy that contains about 200 billion stars, including our Sun. It is about 100,000 light-years across and about 10,000 light-years thick. If you are at a place which has a very dark night sky, you can sometimes see the Milky Way as a thick band of stars in the sky. We live near the edge of the Milky Way.
