CONTENTS About the Milky Way Galaxy Size Shape Age IO Stars I2 Dust 14 16 Gas Planets 18 20 22 24 26 The Central Black Hole The Central Bulge Clusters The Halo Our Home Galaxy Glossary For More Information Index 28 30 31 32
ABOUT THE A MILKY WAY GALAXY Look up on a dark clear night See that faint dusting of white stars stretching across the sky That's the Milky Way galaxy It s made up of hundreds of billions of stars and clouds of dust and gas Our Sun is one of those billions of stars That means Earth and all the other planets of our solar system at On a dark clear night the Milky Way is a spectacular
THINK ABOUT IT The Milky Way galaxy is full of dust as well as stars With the naked eye we can see only a few thousand of the galaxy’s hundreds of billions of stars What could be E blocking our view The Milky Way galaxy position of Earth in galaxy are also part of the Milky Way The galaxy is shaped like a giant pinwheel We re inside one of the pinwheel's arms All the diameter of Milky Way galaxy 100 000 ight years stars you see are in our arm or galaxy viewed from above galaxy viewed from the side o 2013 Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc elsewhere in the pinwheel From above the Milky Way looks like a A pinwheel From the side it looks like a flat disk with a slightly bulging center
