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The Milky Way is actually a name of a huge galaxy that lies close to the earth and even the earth happens to be a part of the galaxy. It encompasses a huge part of the Solar System and when we look at Milky Way and its pictures it seems like a white stream of milk flowing with thousands of shining particles in it. These shining particles could be stars or galaxies themselves. |
What we can see of the Milky Way is a very small part and it is much bigger than what we see. It is called the Milky Way because we always tend to notice a band of light in the night sky. The celestial sphere consists of thousands of other galaxies and some as big as the Milky Way itself.
The discovery of the Milky Way can be credited to one of the Greek astronomers called Democritus and he was the first person to notice it and also acknowledge it to be a galaxy. He also assumed that the Milky Way stretched for billions of kilometers and was made of many stars.
The Milky Way is known to be more than thirteen billion years old and that is when the big bang theory could have occurred. So basically the Milky Way is as old as the universe itself. However, it would be astonishing to know that the Milky Way is just one of the several galaxies in the universe. The Earth’s solar system lies very near to the Milky Way and we are literally neighbors. Also, the Milky Way halves the night skies into two equal hemispheres with its light. The Andromeda galaxy can be very close to the Milky Way.
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