| Galaxies |
Our sun and all the stars you can see in the sky belong to a giant family of stars that we call our Galaxy. On a
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dark night, the the Milky Way looks like a hazy band across the sky (as below). It is the light from countless stars in the Galaxy.
If you could go far out in space to look at the Galaxy, you could see a flat, circular shape with a bulge in the middle and pattern of spiral arms. Between the stars there are giant clouds of gas and dust, some of them shinning brightly and some dark. Beyond our own there are many more galaxies scattered all through the Universe as we have here like Andromeda, M49, M100, NGC 7673 and others...
Here we have a picture of two galaxies and the collision of those two (above), sometimes the galaxies collide with each other.
Some well known galaxies
The nearest galaxies to us are the Magellanic Clouds. They look like clouds of stars and can be seen only from the southern hemisphere. They are about 180000 light years away. The biggest galaxy in our local group is the Andromeda Galaxy.One of the biggest galaxies that astronomers have studied is an eliptical one called M87. It is a million light years across and 50 million light years away.
| Milky way Our solar system lies in one of the spiral arms of the disc-shaped galaxy called the Milky Way. This
photograph looks towards the centre of the Milky Way, 30,000 light years away. Bright star clusters are visible in the image along with darker areas of dust and gas. ®
The brightest part of the Milky Way is in the constellation Sagittarius. What we can see is the center of our own Galaxy . There are stars, dark clouds of gas and dust in it. The most famous cloud in the Milky Way is called 'The Coalsack' and is in the Southern Cross. The Milky Way contains 100000 stars in it The stars in the Milky Way orbit round the center of the galaxy. The sun takes 225 million years to make one orbit. |
| Andromeda The Andromeda Galaxy, a spiral galaxy similar to our own, though somewhat larger. It is the farthest object
that is visible with the naked eye and it is our nearest galaxy. It can be seen in the northern-sky constellation Andromeda. The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are the dominant members of the Local Group of galaxies, which in turn is an outlying part of the Virgo Cluster, which comprises thousands of galaxies. The spiral galaxy in Andromeda is just over 2 million years away. There are two small elliptical galaxies close to it.
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M 49
An elliptical galaxy M 4, photographed with a large astronomical telescope. This giant ball of stars is 42 million light years away and measures 50000 light years across. |
M 100
The spiral galaxy M100 is between 35 million and 80 million light-years from the earth. The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the core and spiral arms of M100 after repairs had been made to the telescope in December 1993.
NASA/Gamma Liaison |
NGC 7673
The Hubble Space Telescope targeted the spiral galaxy NGC 7673 in October of 1996 and 1997. In this view, two galaxies flank NGC 7673 to its left and right. These galaxies appear redder because they are more distant.
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