Galaxy Milky facts
While investigating facts about Galaxy Milky Way and Galaxy Milky Way Universe, I found out little known, but curios details like:
Today's average teenagers know vastly more about the Milky Way and other galaxies than professional astronomers of 100 years ago.
how big is the milky way galaxy?
Dung beetles can navigate when only the Milky Way or clusters of bright stars are visible and are the only insect known to orient itself by the galaxy!
What is milky way galaxy?
In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what type of galaxy is the milky way. Here are 50 of the best facts about Galaxy Milky Way Solar System and Galaxy Milky Way Wallpaper I managed to collect.
where are we at in the milky way galaxy?
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The Milky Way, Andromeda, and all the nearby galaxies are being pulled into something that we can't see that is tens of thousands of times more massive than our galaxy, called The Great Attractor.
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If the Solar System fit in your hand the Milky Way galaxy would be size of North America
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It takes the Earth (and the Sun) 226 million years to orbit around the Milky Way Galaxy. Which means Earth has made the orbit around our galaxy about 20 times since the planet is 4.5 billion years old.
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The Milky Way may already be a zombie galaxy, having stopped producing new stars a billion years ago but still moving
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Due to time dilation its possible to travel anywhere in the galaxy within a human lifetime. A ship accelerating constantly at 1g (earth gravity) could travel to the center of the milky way and back in 40 years.
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When the Northridge Earthquake caused a massive power outage in L.A. in 1994, panicked residents called 911 to express alarm about a strange ethereal light overhead; they were seeing the Milky Way Galaxy for the first time.
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The Milky Way Galaxy is located in the largest empty void in the observable universe.
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There are more trees on Earth than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
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Approximately half of the atoms in our bodies originated in the Milky Way, while the other half are from other galaxies.
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If the Sun was a grain of sand, and the Earth a microscopic speck one inch away, then Jupiter would lie 5.2 inches away, the nearest star would be about 4.3 miles away, and the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy itself would be about 100,000 miles.
Galaxy Milky data charts
For your convenience take a look at Galaxy Milky figures with stats and charts presented as graphic.
Why is the galaxy called the milky way?
You can easily fact check why is our galaxy named the milky way by examining the linked well-known sources.
There is a supermassive void in space called the Boötes void and if the Milky Way had been in the center of the void, we wouldn't have known there were other galaxies until the 1960s. The void is 0.27% the width of the entire observable universe.
The Milky Way has several "satellite galaxies", smaller galaxies that orbit our galaxy like moons to a planet. - source
The Milky Way galaxy is located in a comparatively empty region of space known as the KBC Void. At approximately 2 billion light-years in diameter it is the largest known void in the universe - source
There are over 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe and that up until 1924, the common knowledge was that the milky way was itself the whole universe
The Milky Way galaxy may reside in the largest void in observable space. - source
When will the andromeda galaxy collide with the milky way?
In 4 billion years, when the Andromeda galaxy and the milky way collide, the probability even just two stars colliding is negligible.
How many stars are in the milky way galaxy?
The Milky Way has two expanding bubbles attached to its core that are entirely powered by gamma rays. These objects, literally “burped out” by the galaxy and known as "Fermi bubbles," are some of the weirdest objects in the universe
Accoridng to scientific predictions, the Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy within 4 billion years, creating a hybrid galaxy dubbed "Milkomeda".
In the northern hemisphere, EVERYTHING visible in the night sky with the naked eye is within in our milky way galaxy...except one "star" which is actually the entire Andromeda galaxy.
About Galactic Tick Day, a day to celebrate the Solar System's progress around the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Occurring once every Galactic 'tick' (one centiarcsecond of a Galactic year) the next Galactic Tick Day will fall on June 26, 2018.