Table of Contents
What is galaxy in simple words?
The Short Answer: A galaxy is a huge collection of gas, dust, and billions of stars and their solar systems, all held together by gravity. It’s a small part of the Milky Way Galaxy. A galaxy is a huge collection of gas, dust, and billions of stars and their solar systems. A galaxy is held together by gravity.
What are the 4 types of galaxies?
Galaxies 101 The smallest of galaxies contain a “mere” few hundred million stars while the largest galaxies contain up to one hundred trillion stars! Scientists have been able to segment galaxies into 4 main types: spiral, elliptical, peculiar, and irregular.
What is galaxy made of?
Galaxies are sprawling systems of dust, gas, dark matter, and anywhere from a million to a trillion stars that are held together by gravity. Nearly all large galaxies are thought to also contain supermassive black holes at their centers.
What is galaxy and universe?
Galaxies come in many sizes. The Milky Way is big, but some galaxies, like our Andromeda Galaxy neighbor, are much larger. The universe is all of the galaxies – billions of them! Our Milky Way Galaxy is one among the billions of galaxies in our Universe.
What type of galaxy do we live in?
the Milky Way
We live in one of the arms of a large spiral galaxy called the Milky Way. The Sun and its planets (including Earth) lie in this quiet part of the galaxy, about half way out from the centre. 100 000 years to cross from one side to the other.
What is galaxy example?
The definition of a galaxy is a large area, particularly of dust, stars and gas that makes up a universe. An example of a galaxy is the Milky Way. Many galaxies are grouped into clusters, with the clusters themselves often grouped into larger superclusters.
What galaxy do we live in?
We live in one of the arms of a large spiral galaxy called the Milky Way. The Sun and its planets (including Earth) lie in this quiet part of the galaxy, about half way out from the centre.
How do you identify a galaxy?
Galaxies are classified by shape. There are three general types: elliptical, spiral, and irregular. Perhaps the most familiar kind of galaxy are spiral galaxies. They have a distinctive shape with spiral arms in a relatively flat disk and a central “bulge”.
How old is our galaxy?
13.51 billion years
Milky Way/Age
Most galaxies are between 10 billion and 13.6 billion years old. Our universe is about 13.8 billion years old, so most galaxies formed when the universe was quite young! Astronomers believe that our own Milky Way galaxy is approximately 13.6 billion years old.
What is the largest galaxy in our universe?
IC 1101
The biggest known galaxy is IC 1101, which is 50 times the Milky Way’s size and about 2,000 times more massive. It is about 5.5 million light-years across. Nebulas, or vast clouds of gas, also have impressively large sizes.
What universe do we live in?
Most astronomers believe that we live in a low-density Universe in which a mysterious substance known as ‘dark energy’ accounts for 70% of its content, and therefore, pervades everything.
What is our closest galaxy?
The Andromeda galaxy
The Andromeda galaxy, M31, is a faint fuzzy patch that appears, with binoculars, as a lens-shaped object. It is a galaxy rather like ours at a distance of about 2 million light years. It has two dwarf elliptical satellites, which can be seen with a small telescope.
What things are in the Galaxy?
A galaxy is a massive, gravitationally bound system that consists of stars, stellar objects (such as brown dwarfs and neutron stars), nebulae, an interstellar medium of gas and dust, black holes, and an unknown component of dark matter.
What galaxy is considered nearest to our galaxy?
The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is the closest spiral galaxy to us, and though it’s gravitationally bound to the Milky Way, it’s not the closest galaxy by far – being 2 million light years away. Andromeda is currently approaching our galaxy at a speed of about 110 kilometers per second.
What are some facts about our galaxy?
Some of the facts about our galaxy are: Fact 1: The Milky Way galaxy is a barred, spiral galaxy. The diameter varies between 100,000-120,000 light years. Fact 2: About 90% of our galaxy’s mass is comprised of a halo of dark matter which is not visible directly.
Which galaxy is home to Earth and what type of galaxy is it?
The Milky Way Galaxy — home to planet Earth — is on a collision course with another interstellar body, a spiral of stars known as the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).