Category Kids Queries

We are moving at an average velocity of 828,000 km/hr. But even at that high rate, it still takes us about 230 million years to make one complete orbit around the Milky Way!

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. We believe that it consists of a central bulge, 4 major arms, and several shorter arm segments. The Sun (and, of course, the rest of our solar system) is located near the Orion arm, between two major arms (Perseus and Sagittarius). The diameter of the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years and the Sun is located about 28,000 light-years from the Galactic Centre.

It is interesting to note that recent observations by astronomers suggest that the Milky Way is in fact a “barred spiral galaxy”, not just a spiral galaxy. This means that rather than a simple spherical bulge of gas and stars at its center, it has instead a “bar of stars” crossing the central bulge. 

Picture Credit :Google

As recently as a hundred years ago, astronomers thought the entire universe was contained in the Milky Way. But then Edwin Hubble figured out how to measure the distance of faraway objects. Suddenly, we learned that many smudges in the night sky weren’t within our galaxy at all – they were actually other galaxies outside our own! Today, astronomers suspect that the universe contains about 200 billion other galaxies. However, that figure is unlikely to be reliable. Subsequent sensitive observations found that many faint galaxies were not observed the first time. The most recent, and likely the most accurate, survey found that the real number of galaxies is ten times larger: so, in total, there are 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, or 2,000 billion, if you prefer.

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A supermassive black hole  is the largest type of black hole in a galaxy, with a mass millions of times that of our sun .Though it can’t be imaged directly because black holes pull in all light, scientists have inferred its presence by looking at the speed and motion of stars and matter close to the galactic center. They have inferred that the movements are influenced by the gravitational pull of a black hole. No one knows how the black holes at the center of galaxies form, but some suspect that they may begin as a cluster of smaller black holes that merge, or as a smaller black hole that consumes enough matter to become a supermassive one.

Picture Credit : Google

The core of the Milky Way is only visible about half of the year. The other half it is located beneath the horizon. In the winter months (December – February) it is not visible at all because it’s too close to the sun. In the spring (March – May), it will first become visible a few hours before sunrise. By June it will rise much earlier before midnight. The summer months (June – August) are generally the best viewing time because it will be up most of the night. By fall (September – November) the Milky Way will be best seen in the evening, before it sets. Twilight can brighten the sky up to 2 hours before sunrise and 2 hours after sunset, so you want to avoid those times.

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The word ‘galaxy’ is derived from a Greek word for ‘milk’. Although there is not absolute proof as to why they named our galaxy as something related to milk, some researchers believe what seems to be the most likely and also most plausible reason for the name – its appearance against the night sky.

The milky band that you see on the edge of the Milky Way is actually a concentrated chunk of millions upon millions of stars that shine incredibly brightly. Also, the image of the Milky Way that we see up in the night sky in unpolluted areas (especially remote, rural locations) is on its side; it is due to the angle of viewing that the galaxy appears to be a thin, shiny arc of light, rather than an enormous, bright disk.

Picture Credit : Google

If you wanted to mail a letter to an alien pen pal in some distant neighborhood of the universe, you’d need to send more than just your street address to receive a reply. Specifically, you’d need to tell your faraway friend that you live on Earth, the third of eight planets (and five ‘’dwarf planets,’’ but we’ll get to those in a bit) in the solar system, a star system in the Milky Way. Earth’s home galaxy, the Milky Way is a disk-shaped vortex of stars, planets, and clouds of interstellar gas and dust (known as nebulae). The Milky Way is a ‘’barred spiral galaxy,’’ meaning it has several arms and a bar that extend from a bulging core thick with gas, dust, and stars. Everything in the galaxy orbits the core.

Picture Credit : Google