The Milky Way Galaxy

by Esha Chettri (Physics Dept.)

THE MILKY WAY GALAXY 

 The Milky Way Galaxy is a large spiral system consisting of several hundred billion of stars including our Sun and the Earth. Earth is located about halfway between the center of the Milky Way and its outer edge. It’s estimated visible diameter is 100,000-200, 000 light-years. It is called a spiral galaxy because if we could view it from the top or bottom, it would look like a spinning pinwheel. Galileo was the first to see the Milky Way Galaxy in 1610. 

Milky Way Galaxy


 The milky Way gets its name from a Greek myth about the Goddess Hera who sprayed milk across the sky. If you are someone fond of stargazing like I am, you could see about 6000 stars belonging to the milky way from Earth without a telescope. If you think of the entire Milky way Galaxy as a giant pizza then all the stars you can see from the Earth fall within about one pepperoni on that pizza.

artistic picture of milky way galaxy


misconceptions about how to find the Milky Way Galaxy

 There are a lot of misconceptions about how to find the Milky Way Galaxy in the night sky. Here are a few tips on how to locate it : 

• The sky should be all clear. There should be no clouds. 

• Find a place with the minimum light pollution. Too much of light washes out the details in the night sky. So if you live in and around a big city, you need to move about 150 miles away from it before you actually see a clear dark sky.

• You need to have a clear understanding of the moon phases . As we know that the moon is very bright, it reduces the visible intensity of the milky Way. Hence, the best time to see it would be during the new moon, when the moon is completely hidden . If the moon is in its first quarter or more, the moonlight will make the sky too bright for us to be able to see the Milky Way.

 For the ones in the Northern Hemisphere, we get the most interesting view of the Galaxy from the month of March to September. 

Fun facts about the milky Way Galaxy :

• It is approximately 890 billion to 1.54 trillion times the mass of the Sun.

• It has an invisible halo due to the large quantity of the dark matter. 

• It is almost as old as the universe itself. • It is always on the move 

• Lurking the heart of the Milky Way is a hungry behemoth, a gigantic black hole with the weight of 4 million Suns. It is called Sagittarius A.

• All the stars and planets you can see are part of the Milky Way galaxy. 

• The Andromeda galaxy is the closest galaxy to the Milky Way. And it’s about two million light-years away. 

•The spiral structure of the milky Way Galaxy can be viewed as consisting of six separate parts: (1) a nucleus, (2) a central bulge, (3) a disk (both a thin and a thick disk), (4) spiral arms, (5) a spherical component, and (6) a massive halo. Some of these components blend into each other

Comments

  1. Anmol SubbaSeptember 4, 2021 at 9:36 PM

    I had no idea that we need to have clear udnerstanding of moon phases to locate milky way in the sky. Thank u Esha, this article is very informative.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DARK MATTER by Anmol Subba

Image
DARK MATTER FOR PEOPLE IN HURRY                                               by Anmol Subba(Dept. of Physics) Those who are students of science or those who watch documentaries on cosmos have surely heard about DARK MATTER. But how many of you exactly know what dark matter really is? WHAT IS DARK MATTER?      But first I want to ask you a question:                           What is in our universe? Those who study science may say matter or energy. But they are just partially right, as in our universe, we find that the matter and energy that we can observe composite of only 5% of what actually is in our universe. This simply means that you, your family, Earth , Solar system, billions of galaxies make only just a tiny bit of the actual universe. So naturally now u may question: What about the remaining 95%? or more curiously why do scientist think observable matter and energy composite of only 5%?      Here are few reasons: 1.GALAXY CLUSTERS      Throughout space, astrophysical objects
Read more

The Chemistry Behind Luminescence: Photochemistry

Image
  By Sai Prasanna Thapa Chemistry Department As a child, I always wondered what made fireflies glow by night, and the seashores of Puerto Rico engulfed in radiant blue tides. Nature seems to have its magic to make things glow, but there is also Science behind it. Photochemistry is a branch of Physical Chemistry that deals with the emission or absorption of radiation. It includes mainly two types of processes—namely, Photophysical processes and Photochemical reactions. Photophysical processes take place in the presence of light without involving any chemical reactions. They occur due to the absorption of light by various substances, followed by the emission of the absorbed light. Photochemical reactions occur by absorption of radiations of an appropriate wavelength. There are chiefly three phenomena that cause Nature to glow: Chemiluminescence, Fluorescence and Phosphorescence. These three together are called Luminescence. As aforementioned, light is absorbed when a photoche
Read more

Oumuamua

Image
     By Esha Chettri Physics Department    On 19 th   October 2017, the first interstellar object visited our solar system. It was later named “ ‘Oumuamua ” and was discovered by Robert Weryk. The fellow astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, spotted the intriguing object with the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan- STARRS1) in Hawaii.    ‘Oumuamua is a Hawaiian word that translated to “scout” is a well-suited name, the strange object is an emissary, a representative of some distant star system we do not know anything about. Prior to entering our solar system, it had been wandering the cold, empty depths of interstellar of the Milky Way for hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions of years, before encountering the sun.    ‘Oumuamua was originally classified as a comet but the observations later revealed no sign of cometary activity after it passed through the Sun on 9 th September 2017 at an incredible speed of 87.3 kilometres per second. It appear
Read more