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Now imagine taking a galactic trip in the Millennium Falcon. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Looking Down on a Galaxy from Above Despite being our nearest galactic neighbour, its stars are only resolveable through a telescope, reminding us of the vastness of the Universe. Yet, the Milky Way Galaxy holds between two hundred to four hundred billion stars, and has special significance, since it is the home galaxy of planet Earth.
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So that’s how galaxies look to the naked eye, like tiny thumbprints in the sky. The great galaxy in the constellation Andromeda, for instance, is one of our near neighbors, and yet even this nearby citadel of stars is resolvable into detail only by telescope. You look up, the star field is dazzling.īut here and there is the odd nebulous smudge of a galaxy. Imagine yourself again, on our same trip, under the starry reach of the Caribbean sky. It’s worth remembering that the very word “galaxy” derives from the Greek term galaxias, or “milky circle,” for its appearance to the eye. Under cover of the night sky, some galaxies can be seen with the naked eye. On a large scale, swarms of such stars dwell in galaxies, effortlessly wheeling their way through the vastness of deep space.Įach galaxy contains millions, if not billions, of stars. (These incredible stats are somewhat put into perspective by the fact that the number of stars in the Universe is the same as the number of H 2O molecules in just ten drops of water!) That’s also eleven times the number of cups of water in all the Earth’s oceans, and one hundred billion times the number of letters in the fourteen million books in the US Library of Congress. The Earth has roughly (and we’re speaking very roughly here) 7.5 x 10 18 grains of sand, or seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains.Īnd yet, there are ten stars for every one of these sand grains. So much sand, so many stars.Ī group of researchers at the University of Hawaii actually tried putting a number to the grains of sand on the world’s beaches. And so on, over all the beaches on Earth. You saunter on a few more steps, and again you gather up the sand and let it fall. Then you let the sand fall through your fingers, the grains glistening as they catch the sunlight.Īnd each star is a sun, like our own local star, the Sun. You reach down, hands cupped, and gather up two handfuls of the golden sand. It’s worth pausing for a while to imagine being on one of those beaches, soft golden sand sweeping off into the distance. Consider galaxies. There are more stars in our Universe than there are grains of sand on all of the beaches on planet Earth.