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
Size Distances in space are measured in light years One light year is the distance that light travels in a year The speed of light is about 186 000 miles per second about 300 000 kilometers per second That means a light year is about 5 9 trillion miles or around 9 5 trillion kilometers So how big is the Milky Way galaxy About 100 000 light years across That's 590 000 000 000 000 000 miles Our solar system is about 27 000 light years away from the Space is so vast that light from the Sun takes more than eight minutes to reach
center of the galaxy The Milky Way is only one of billions of galaxies in the universe The closest galaxy to the Milky Way is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy discovered in 2003 which our galaxy is tearing apart It s actually closer to our solar system than the center of our galaxy is Stream of the Canis Major Galaxy Sun The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy is so close to the Milky Way that it is being slowly ripped apart by the Milky Way’s gravity Canis Major Galaxy Milky Way COMPARE AND CONTRAST The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy is about 25 000 light years from our solar system Earth is about 27 000 light years from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy Is Earth closer to the galactic center of the Milky Way or Canis
