JOURNEY THROUGH THE MILKY WAY

Our home in the universe is a giant spiral system containing many billions of stars – but how much do we really know about it, and what do we still have to learn?

Look up at the sky on a dark, clear night and you can’t miss the Milky Way – a broad swathe of pale light winding its way around the sky among many of the brightest individual stars. Ancient astronomers saw it as a stream of milk spilt across the sky by the goddess Hera when she suckled the hero Hercules, but today we know the Milky Way is something very different – an enormous disc of stars some 100,000 light years across, containing (at the latest estimate) around 200 billion individual stars. Unsurprisingly, then, our Solar System is an insignificant speck within the overall scale of the Milky Way – all the planets and other large bodies orbiting the Sun are confined to a region just a few light hours…

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All About Space Tour of the Universe (Digital) - 1 Issue, All About Space Tour of the Universe 4th Edition

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