Question

What is the Milky Way?

Answer 1

Hint: It is the galaxy that contains our Solar System (which is on the outskirts), and correspondingly the Earth. It is approximately built up of a 100 billion stars. The first person to determine that the galaxy was made up of individual stars in 1610 was Galileo Galilei.

Complete answer: - It's a banded, spiral galaxy (gravitationally bound system of stars and other matter.) The diameter is about 100,000 light years.
- It takes 250 million years for our sun’s revolution to the centre of the Milky Way. It has 500 solar systems except ours and counting. We are located 2700 light years away from the Galactic centre (a radio source called Sagittarius A).
- The only pictures captured of it have been from the inside. Human beings can only see three other galaxies close by, as blurred objects in the sky. The best example is Andromeda.
- The famous astronomer Edward Hubble had determined that we are just one galaxy of many. It is part of the Local Group, which in turn forms the Virgo Supercluster
- An interesting fact is that 90% of the galaxy is actually invisible to our telescopes.

Note: When seen in the night sky, our galaxy looks like a strip of light and got its name from the origins of a similar Greek myth about the goddess Hera. She waa said to have sprayed milk across the sky. The latin phrase ‘via lactea’ translates to a milky circle, also lending insight into its etymology.