Essay, Research Paper: Milky Way

The Milky Way is the place we call home, as well as about 100 billion other stars. It looks very much like other spiral galaxies when viewed from above. There are spiral arms and a nucleus. Viewed from the side, it is about 140,000 LY in width and the nucleus (core) is about 20,000 LY tall. The entire galaxy travels at around 900,000 km/hr. And it takes .25 x 109 to rotate completly. The Sun can be found rather far from the center of the galaxy, halfway to the edge of visible matter along the Orion spiral arm. The Sun is revolving at a speed of half a million miles per hour around the center of the Galaxy, yet it will still take 200 million years for it to go around once. We are but a small speck in the Milky way. If a space rocket travels at the speed of light, it will take it around 140,000 years to get from one end of our galaxy to the other. The Milky Way is but a small speck in the cluster that it belongs to. The Milky Way is part of a cluster that contains 17 galaxies. These clusters of galaxies , called local groups, are parts of Super Clusters. Super Clusters are clusters of clusters. Theres are billions and billions of galaxies out there. We are located on a tiny section of the Milky Way galaxy. Concidering the fact that the Earth is such small object floating in space, could we perhaps be something other than wat we think we are? We know that atoms and other small molecules are the structure of bigger things, like this paper or that desk. Perhaps we (the Earth or maybe this galaxy) are “cells” or “atoms” and we don’t even know it. Maybe we are just small bits and pieces that make up some other life-form’s toenail or bugger globule.There is no way for us to find the boundries of space because we are way to small in comparison to it. Anyways , back to the Milky Way.



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