The Milky Way is the immense, spiral galaxy which is home of our solar system with around 400 billion other stars and their planets, with thousands of nebulae and clusters. The milky way is actually a giant, with a mass of approximately 750 billion and one trillion solar masses. Its diameter is an incredible 100,000 light years! Its arranged into three main components. The first component is the disk, where our solar system exists in. The disk is four spiral arms and is made up primarily of stars which tend to be blue and quite young. They span an age range around one million and ten billion years. The second component is the bulge, which is the center of the galaxy. This is the high density …show more content…
It is necessary to know about the evolution and formation of the galaxy to have a good understanding of our universe. A team working with the Very Large Telescope in Chile report that our galaxy is 13.6 billion years old, give or take 800 million years. This was determined by measuring the amount of the element beryllium in two stars in a so-called globular cluster. The beryllium rises with time, so it can be used as a “cosmic clock” to calculate the ages.
One legend explains how the Milky Way was created by Heracles when he was a baby. His father, Zeus, who was fond of his son, who was born of the mortal woman Alcmene. Another myth of the creation of the milky way includes the Greek goddess Hera (goddess of creation).
These are the reasons that make this galaxy so amazing. The Milky Way is an incredible galaxy because of the known, and