The Milky Way Galaxy 🌀
Sun is just one of the many billions of stars that make up the huge cosmic island we call the Milky Way Galaxy
One of the most striking features you can see in a truly dark sky—one
without light pollution—is the band of faint white light called the
Milky Way, which stretches from one horizon to the other. The name comes
from an ancient Greek legend that compared its faint white splash of
light to a stream of spilled milk. But folktales differ from culture to
culture: one East African tribe thought of the hazy band as the smoke of
ancient campfires, several Native American stories tell of a path across
the sky traveled by sacred animals, and in Siberia, the diffuse arc was
known as the seam of the tent of the sky.
In 1610, Galileo made the first telescopic survey of the Milky Way and
discovered that it is composed of a multitude of individual stars.
Today, we know that the Milky Way comprises our view inward of the huge
cosmic pinwheel that we call the Milky Way Galaxy and that is our home.
Moreover, our Galaxy is now recognized as just one galaxy among many
billions of other galaxies in the cosmos.
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