This week’s blog post will be dedicated to the MilkyWay bar. After all, the cosmos is incomplete without an astronaut’s favorite treat! MilkyWay bars are delicious and non-nutritious chocolate candies filled with nougat and caramel; yum!

April Fools!

This week’s blog post will actually be about the MilkyWay bar’s namesake: our very own Milky Way galaxy! Speaking of bars, the Milky Way galaxy is classified as a barred spiral galaxy. This means that if you looked at the Milky Way from afar, you would see a dense collection of stars in the middle that make a long, bar-like shape, with stars spiraling out from the center. This is a rendition of what our galaxy most likely looks like:

The reason that the Milky Way looks this way is due to a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. This black hole causes stars to rotate about and move towards the galaxy’s center, thus creating a spiral-like shape. The Milky Way is estimated to contain between 200 to 400 billion stars and about 100,000 planets. Most of these stars and planets were formed billions of years ago from the gas and dust that conglomerate to form nebulae, but some are still forming today. If you’d like to learn more about nebulae check out my blog post on them here! Between all the stars in our galaxy lies interstellar gas (composed of 90% hydrogen and 10% helium) and dark matter (an unknown form of matter that interacts with regular matter)

The Milky Way measures a staggering 100,000 light years in diameter and 1,000 light years thick. To put that in perspective, it would take the fastest spacecraft ever built over two billion years to fly across the entire diameter of the Milky Way! You can get a sense of just how large the Milky Way is (and how small the earth is) by looking up in the sky on a dark summers night, away from light pollution. You will see a softly glowing band of stars streaking across the sky. This band resembles a sort of milky road in the black sky, a milky way (wink, wink).

 

 

 

Sources:

Click an image to view its source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way