Milky Way Galaxy: 10 Amazing facts about our galactic home

Just Look at the beauty in this picture. Peaceful, Relaxing, and Beautiful to look at. Yeah, that is the center of our galaxy. We might not all be astronomers or stargazers, But, Everyone of us has this inner curiosity to know more about the stars. So, today I decided to give you a close but exciting look at our home galaxy Milky Way.13.772 billion years ago the universe was created and after some other galaxies started to form along with our galaxy milky way, which is around 13.52 billion years old. Our galaxy is not that different from other galaxies. It is a typical barred spiral, very much like other galaxies in the universe. The ancients called it the celestial river. As you can see it is like a river in the photo that band of light that is seen overhead on very dark nights and that is how the name of our home galaxy was given the milky way.

So, Here is some interesting facts about our home galaxy Milky Way.

10. It's on the move

The earth moves around the sun, and our Sun moves around the galaxy relative to the center of our Galaxy. Milky Way is moving through space as a part of the Local Group, which is moving relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

The universe is expanding at rapid speed, and the expansion is accelerating every second. So, these local groups of galaxies are getting far far away from each other.CMB is the term they use when determining the velocity of things in the universe. Relative to the CMB, our Local Group is moving at a speed of about 600 km/s, which is about 2.2 million km/h. So that way You are moving through at 600 km/h, and you don't even know it!

9. It is almost as old as the universe itself

As I talked earlier, the universe is about 13.772 billion years old, and our milky way is about 13.52 billion years old. When big bang happened our universe expanded from the size of a peanut to the size, we can't even explore right now. So, at the beginning there were just protons and radiation, these protons will after collide and form matter.

This proton filled universe will form galaxies later, which contains enough gas and dust to make billions of stars. That is how our galaxy was created. The age of our galaxy is determined by the age of some of the oldest stars in the universe and then extrapolating the age of what preceded them. Feel old yet?

8. We can't take pictures of it

When you see a picture of a galaxy and below it's written that it's our milky way then runway from that place because they might be high on some stuff and you don't want to get involved in police and stuff. We as a solar System are revolving around our galaxy, and every picture we can take is either the center of it or the outside of it. We can't take a full picture of it yet. Because the milky way has a diameter of 100,000 light years.Which means it takes 100,000 years for light to just cross our galaxy.

7. It was made from other galaxies

The milky way wasn't always the same as it is Today - a beautiful, warped spiral. When two galaxies are getting closer to each other, usually the smallest galaxy gets eaten by the bigger one, and it takes all the stars from that other galaxy. Our home galaxy has a great history of eating other galaxies. The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy is the closest galaxy to the Milky Way because its stars are currently being added to the Milky Way’s disk. This galaxy is about 25,000 light years away from earth, making it the closest galaxy from the earth. Milky way gets bigger and bigger every time it consumes other galaxies.

6. It has over 200 billion stars

From all the other galaxies in our local group or in the universe, the Milky Way is a middleweighted galaxy. The largest galaxy we know by far is IC 1101, which is a supergiant elliptical galaxy at the center of the Abell 2029 galaxy clusters, it has over 100 trillion stars. Most giant galaxies after that have about a trillion stars. The dwarf galaxies such as our neighbor The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy can have around 10 billion stars. Milky Way has approximately 100 billion - 400 billion stars; but when you look up into the dark night sky, the most you can see from any one point on the globe is about 2,500. The number is not fixed, because the Milky Way loses and gains new stars every day.

5. It Has a Halo, but You Can’t Directly See It

You might have heard of dark matter, Our scientists believe that 90% of our galaxy is consist of this dark matter. That means that all the matter that we can see, including our sun, all the stars, and every luminous matter makes up less than 10% of the total mass of our galaxy. This dark matter is dark, which means that it is not in the form of stars and planets that we can see. Observations showed that there is far too little visible matter in this universe to make up the 27% required by the observations. It is kind of a mystery that scientists are trying to solve.

4. It has a Supermassive black hole at the center of it

Every Galaxy has a black hole at the center of it that holds all the matter around it. Which ends up forming the galaxy. The more massive the black, the more influential the black hole, the larger the galaxy. Our galaxy also has a black hole at the center of it. We call this black hole Sagittarius A. It contains the mass of roughly 4.3 million Suns. The gravity of these black holes is so powerful that even light can't escape it. That way we can't see a black hole, all we see is darkness. This year we captured the first image of a black hole, this black hole lies at the center of M87 galaxy. The black hole has a mass of 6.5 billion suns, and it is as big as our whole solar system.

3. Inside the Milky Way, there are at least 100 billion planets

Every star has its own Solar system. The milky way has about 200 billion stars, and about less than 100 billion of them has planets,Some of these planets are in the habitable zone, which means they are not too close from their home star that all the water on it gets vaporized, and they are not too far that all the water on it freezes. As of October 2016 astronomers has confirmed that milky way has around 4,000 planets which are in the habitable zone in their solar systems. These are the planets that might contain life or micro life, such as bacteria.

2. The ancient stars still exist in the Milky Way

There are more than 150 ancient groups of stars, some of which are among the oldest in the universe. These are called global clusters, these primordial stellar conglomerates live in the Milky Way’s halo and orbit the center of our galaxy. The star known as 2MASS J18082002–5104378 B is the oldest stars of our galaxy. Age of this star is about 13.5 billion years, which is as old as our own galaxy. Surprisingly, this star is smaller than our sun.

1. Our Neighbor galaxy called Andromeda will collide with our galaxy in the future

Our galaxy is a part of a binary system of giant spirals. As of now, the Milky Way and Andromeda are about 2.5 million light years away from each other. Both galaxies are heading towards each other by the attraction of gravity and at the speed of 402,000 kilometers per hour. But Even at this speed, they won't meet for another 4 billion years. That will be the end of our galaxy and the beginning of a new galaxy called Milkdromeda. Because of the vast distance between every star in our galaxy and in Andromeda, During the collision, our solar system will survive. So, our solar system will outlive its own galaxy. Then, our solar system will have a new cosmic and galactic address: A massive elliptical galaxy, formed by the collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda.

Since our old friends dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, our sun has only traveled one-third of the way around the center of the Milky Way. With our daily busy life, we forget how unusual and fascinating our own galaxy and sun is, our sun is about 4.5 billion years old, and the earth is also is about 4.5 billion years old. We as a species are about only 250,000 years old, which is very young comparing to the age of our own galaxy.

Thank you for reading my whole article. I hope you loved it.I'd love to know your thoughts about our galaxy, go comment so that I can reply to each and every one of you.