Milky Way

Sleepless nights spent ruminating and regurgitating past events all the while ruing their aftermath often drained Surina the next morning; nonetheless, on the first full day in space, she awoke restored. Certainly, her restful sleep was not entirely due to the profound physical exhaustion from the lift off to space. Rather, after her consciousness roamed amongst the stars, she gained a fresh perspective that allowed her to rest from the burden of her sorrows for the first time in many years.…

Astronomers discovered a galaxy 9.8 billion light years away that creates an astounding 800 stars a year. To put this in perspective, the Milky Way produces two stars per year at most. “It is very exciting to have discovered such an interesting object,” said Gillian Wilson, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside and a member of the research team. “Understanding its nature proved to be a real scientific challenge which required the combined efforts of an…

the spiral structure. The galaxy is similar to our Milky Way, but our favorable view provides a better picture of the typical architecture of spiral galaxies. Though the galaxy is 11.6 million light-years away, the vision of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is so sharp that it can resolve individual stars, along with open star clusters, globular star clusters, and even glowing regions of fluorescent gas. The spiral arms, which wind all the way down into the nucleus, are made up of young,…

example of this is the following: the nearest galaxy to the Milky Way is called the Andromeda Galaxy. It is just over two and a half million light years away, which means that the light we see from there is just over two and a half million years old because this is the distance between us and the Andromeda Galaxy. Now imagine those numbers written out. Wait, don’t even attempt it, I’ll write them for you. The nearest galaxy to our Milky Way is the Andromeda Galaxy. It is just over…

unable to distinguish features within the galaxy. Luckily, microscopes combined with the intellect of many bright astronomers over the years have allowed us to better understand what the human eye cannot see, in particular what lies beyond the Milky Way Galaxy in our neighboring galaxy. This paper will focus on some of the recent discoveries and observations on the Andromeda Galaxy that have been key in helping our planet comprehend what lies beyond us. Recently,…

A spiral galaxy is a certain kind of galaxy originally described by Edwin Hubble in his 1936 work The Realm of the Nebulae and, as such, forms part of the Hubble sequence. Spiral galaxies consist of a flat, rotating disc containing stars, gas and dust, and a central concentration of stars known as the bulge.(Sloan) Spiral galaxies resemble spiraling pinwheels, nearly 77% of space consists of spiral galaxies. Though the stars and other visible material contained in such a galaxy lie mostly on a…

Laying on the fresh cut grass of your lawn, you watch the sun sink behind the mountains as day subtly fades into night. There is always a minute of darkness as the city holds its breath. No street lights. No cars. Just you and the sky and… the faint glow of a star. Seeing the first star that night, you make a wish and remember the first time you saw one. You still wonder what that speck of light is—How it got to be up there, why it sometimes is so bright and other times so faint, and how it…

galaxies in 1936. 11. Hubble believed that all galaxies start off as elliptical changed into spirals later on in its life, and finally becomes a spiral galaxy. We now know that once a type of galaxy forms it does not change shape. 12. Unlike the Milky Way, most stars in different galaxies have pairs. These pairs of stars are known…

NGC 584 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Cetus. The galaxy was discovered on 10 September 1785 by the German-British astronomer William Herschel. Number 20 in the Herschel 400 list is NGC 584. NGC 584 is a moderately large and bright elliptical galaxy in Cetus. In an 18 inch telescope it appears as an elongated patch of light with a bright center. The two bright galaxies either side of NGC 584 are the 13.2 magnitude NGC 582; (left) and the 15.2 magnitude PGC 1028168. (Right). While…

Cepheid Variable Stars are large and luminous yellow stars in space known to sporadically change size and temperature resulting in pulsing variations in brightness and thus, inconsistent levels of luminosity. There are two types of Cepheid Variable Stars; Type 1 Cepheids (or classical) which are high mass stars with smaller pulsating periods and Type 2 Cepheids which are lower mass stars with greater pulsation periods. All Cepheid Variable Stars, named after the first observed star of this type,…