Facts about the Milky Way

The Milky Way consists of at least 200 and possibly as lots of as 400 billion stars. It is spread out as a narrow disk, and from the outside it would look like a spiral galaxy. Recent facts suggest that the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy. This is a kind of spiral galaxy. It has a central bar-shaped structure consisting of stars. Barred spiral galaxies are common, and the bar structure is believed to be a stellar nursery fuelling star birth in the centers. The bar acts like a mechanism that channels gas inwards from the spiral arms towards the center, and stars are born out of the interstellar cloud.

The following are some of the interesting facts associated with the Milky way.

1. It is commonly known as either the Milky Way or Galaxy.
2. The Milky Way is in between the way where Earth and our Solar System are located.
3. Aristotle, in his studies, Meteorologica, said that the Milky Way may be made up of distant stars.
4. Galileo provided a proof about the Aristotle statement about the Milky Way.  He proved that the Milky Way did consist of stars when he used his telescope.
5. Similar to other galaxies, the Milky Way contains a bulge, disk, and halo at its center.
6. The bulge in the center of the Milky Way contains old stars.
7. The halo of the Milky Way is said to contain dark matter and globular clusters.
8. The disk is said to be made of young stars, dust, and gas.
9. The Milky Way is called as a binary system.
10. There are other Dwarf Galaxies which orbit the Milky Way.
11. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy having central bar consisting of stars.
12. When you look at the night sky, all the visible stars are part of the Milky Way Galaxy.
13. The Milky Way’s center can be located in the direction of Sagittarius.
14. The Milky Way’s size is approximately 30 kilo parsecs (100,000 light years) in diameter.
15. The Milky Way’s thickness is nearly 3,000 light years.
16. The distance between the Milky Way’s center and Sun is said to be 25,000 to 28,000. The exact figures are still not obtained.
17. There are spiral arms appears to be coming out from the center of the Milky Way.
18. It is said that in November 2010, two large spherical bubbles of energy are discovered that are exploding to the north and south of the Milky Way’s center.
19. Sun will take more or less 220,000,000 years to make a complete rotation around the Milky Way.
20. The Andromeda Galaxy is a similar galaxy as the Milky Way.

The Milky Way has been described as a serpent or a river, and in Sweden they call the galaxy as Vinter Gatan – ‘Winter Street’. Poets said that it is the Winter Street that will connect us with the wonder of our nocturnal skies. The word Galaxy comes from the Greek word. A galaxy is a system made up of billions of stars, like our Sun. It is believed that there are more than one hundred billion galaxies in the universe at present.