What is the difference between our solar system and our galaxy?
When we say milky way, is it what our solar system is called, what exactly is a galaxy and where is our place in it?
How many Solar Systems are there?
what our solar system is called – Our solar system is nestled inside a very large galaxy of stars called the Milky Way.
what exactly is a galaxy – A galaxy is a cluster of stars, nebulae, dark matter, and other astronomical objects.
where is our place in it? – The galaxy in which we live is probably a typical spiral galaxy, although recent research shows it has a small bar across the center, making it a barred spiral. It is an island of tens of billions of stars together with gas and dust.
It is roughly the shape of a “flying saucer”, with a bulge in the middle of a flat disc. Stars and dust are arranged into spirals within the disc, which measures about 100,000 light years across. Ancient globular star clusters form a halo around the Galaxy.
We live near a star (the Sun) roughly half way out along the disc. When we look at the night sky we can see a mass of distant stars in the disc, partly hidden by clouds of dust. These stars we call the Milky Way, and this is how our galaxy gets its name. It is sometimes just called the Galaxy.
The Milky Way is the second largest galaxy in the small cluster to which it belongs.
How many solar systems are there? – Several other stars have disk-shaped clouds around them that seem to be solar systems in formation. In 1983, an infrared telescope in space photographed such a disk around Vega, the brightest star in the constellation Lyra. This discovery represented the first direct evidence of such material around any star except the sun. In 1984, astronomers photographed a similar disk around Beta Pictoris, a star in the southern constellation Pictor.
By the early 2000′s, astronomers had discovered that more than 50 stars like our sun have planets orbiting them. In almost all cases, they found only one planet per star. All the planets found are probably gaseous with no solid surface.
Our Solar System – Size Of Planets and Stars to Scale
solar system
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