why our galaxy named milky way what myth found in it?
104812
Our galaxy is named the Milky Way because one of its spiral arms is visible in the night sky as a bright silvery white band. The Greeks called it the "Galaxias Kyklos (Milky Circle)", and the Romans called it the "Via Lactea (Milky Way)". The Greek term survived as the modern name "Galaxy". However, it is much later the we discover that the Milky Way was a galaxy of stars and that our Sun is one of the billions of stars within the Milky Way.\n\nThe Milky Way gets its name from a Greek myth about the goddess Hera who sprayed milk across the sky. The details of the Greek myth is as follows:\n\nIn order to win the hand of Alcmene, the youth Amphitryon was required to avenge the death of Alcmene's brothers. On the very night that Amphitryon fulfilled his pledge, the supreme god Zeus disguised himself as the youth and stole into Alcmene's chamber. He assured her that the act of vengeance had been fulfilled, and lay with her. The result of their union was the hero Hercules.\n\nZeus' wife Hera was notoriously jealous of her husband's infidelities, usually taking vengeance on either the rival, or the children of Zeus' extra-marital couplings. On this occasion, however, Zeus outwitted Hera. He arranged for her to come across the infant as if abandoned, and in compassion the goddess began to suckle it, thereby granting Hercules the gift of immortality through her milk. But Hercules gave Hera's nipple such a lusty tug that the goddess screamed in pain. As she pulled the child away from her, a fountain gushed from her breast. Some of the milk fell to the earth, to form lilies, but most of it shot into the sky, to become the Milky Way.
37854
Estimates are between 10^22 to 10^24 for the universe.\nhttp://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEM75BS1VED_extreme_0.html\nFrom the site in the source -\nLike the number of grains of sand on the beach or angels that can dance on the head of a pin, the number of stars in the sky remains a great unknown. Discussing the number of stars in the Milky Way alone, astronomer William Keel, writing for the sci.astro Galaxies FAQ, claims that there are "about as many as the number of hamburgers sold by McDonald's."\n\nThen he elaborates. The usual way to determine the number of stars in the universe is to consider how many stars there are in the Milky Way, and then to multiply that number by our best guesstimate at the number of galaxies in the universe. This FAQ suggests there are probably about 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, although "a 50% error either way is quite plausible." As for the number of galaxies in the universe, well that's a whole separate mathematical puzzle.\n\nOther star enumerators we located on the Web offer numbers ranging from more than 200 billion stars in our galaxy to 3 thousand million billion stars (3 followed by 16 zeroes), in the universe. NASA alleges there are zillions of uncountable stars.\n\nFrom a recent astronomy news article on CNN.com, we learned about the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an ambitious astronomy project currently mapping the night sky, to determine the "positions and absolute brightnesses of more than 100 million celestial objects."\n\nSo stay tuned, the star count is still out.
665147
only a few galaxies have names: the sombrero, the milky way, andromeda, the black eye, the pinwheel, the small and large malgentic clouds, the whirlpool, and the spindle are all i know of.\n\nMost go by NGC #### in the new star catalouges.\n\nand we only have found a few galaxies.  There are still almost unlimited more!
111814
The galaxy is help up by angular momentum. The star are all rotating around the center of the galaxy, although the details are different from a simple solar system, and the resulting orbits can be a tad odd.\n\nThe real question is what hold the galaxy together - and that is gravity. Gravity from all the stars, dust, and the massive black home in the center of most galaxies (including ours) and a large gravitational contribution from "missing matter."
699930
The Milky Way is the galaxy which is the home of our Solar System together with at least 200 billion other stars (more recent estimates have given numbers around 400 billion) and their planets, and thousands of clusters and nebulae.\nAs a galaxy, the Milky Way is actually a giant, as its mass is probably between 750 billion and one trillion solar masses, and its diameter is about 100,000 light years. Radio astronomial investigations of the distribution of hydrogen clouds have revealed that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy.\nOur solar system is thus situated within the outer regions of this galaxy, well within the disk and only about 20 light years "above" the equatorial symmetry plane (to the direction of the Galactic North Pole, see below), but about 28,000 light years from the Galactic Center.
434313
Mathematically it makes sense based on the number of star systems.\nWe may have been visited throughout human history. Check out the link below...
335586
Who told you the Milky Way is going to explode in 5 million years?\nI know of no scientific evidence or opinion that offers the possiblity that the Milky Way will explode (what would cause it to explode???) in 5 million years.
1028391
Our galaxy is the Milky Way.\n\nThe story I heard spoke of a Greek god who was carrying cans of milk to Mt. Olympus when he tripped and spilled the milk across the sky.  The milk became the band of stars we see splashed across the night sky.
1073938
Well dear....we aren't centrally placed in our milky way galaxy.....our solar system lies at a distance of about 30,000 light years from its centre....and we don't know the extremities of our universe yet hence our position with respect to the universe can't be measured..
277935
A galaxy is a huge gravitationally bound system of stars, interstellar gas and dust, plasma, and (possibly) unseen dark matter. Typical galaxies contain 10 million to one trillion (107 to 1012) stars, all orbiting a common center of gravity. In addition to single stars and a tenuous interstellar medium, most galaxies contain a large number of multiple star systems and star clusters as well as various types of nebulae. Most galaxies are several thousand to several hundred thousand light years in diameter and are usually separated from one another by distances on the order of millions of light years.\n\nAlthough so-called dark matter appears to account around 90% of the mass of most galaxies, the nature of this unseen components is not well understood. There is some evidence that supermassive black holes may exist at the center of many, if not all, galaxies.\n\nIntergalactic space, the space between galaxies, is filled with a tenuous plasma with an average density less than one atom per cubic meter. There are probably more than a hundred billion (1011) galaxies in the visible universe.
577859
Someone just added an extra "e" in it.\n\nOur Solar System is in a Galaxy called the Milky Way. The Milky Way comprises stars and other material lying within a galactic plane. Relative to the celestial equator, the Milky Way passes as far north as the constellation of Cassiopeia and as far south as the constellation of Crux, indicating the high inclination of Earth's equatorial plane and the plane of the ecliptic relative to the galactic plane.\n\nThe fact that the Milky Way divides the night sky into two roughly equal hemispheres indicates that the solar system lies close to the galactic plane.\n\nThe main disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is about 80,000 to 100,000 light years in diameter, about 250-300 thousand light years in circumference, and outside the Galactic core, about 1,000 light years in thickness. It is composed of 200 to 400 billion stars.
820102
Well, we know that the galaxy is rotating, if for no other reason than by analogy with other galaxies we see in the universe which we can see rotating.  Moreover, we more or less know the basic shape of the galaxy, which is a rotating disk of stars with a central ball shaped bulge of stars (which also rotates, but the important thing here is the disk).  Additionally we can infer from observations that whatever the center of the galaxy is, we're not it.  :)\n\nUsing the doppler shifts of light, we can tell how fast other stars or clouds of dust in the galaxy are moving with respect to us (but only in the sense that this would be the speed if the star/dust was moving directly towards or away from us).  So, you measure the speed of things around the disk of the galaxy, and there will be four directions in which the speed you measure will be zero.  The final thing we do is look to see which direction has more "stuff".  The direction with more stars and dust (and the central bulge too) is the one which is the center of the galaxy.\n\nNow, if you're wondering why you just wouldn't look for the central bulge or the direction with more stars and dust, well, this will give you the general direction of the galactic center, but it's not very precise.  It's the astronomical equivalent of saying, "It's over that-away".  To get something more precise and exact, you need to do something else, which could be what I was saying above.  Above you would get four pretty precise and exact directions separated by 90 degrees on the sky, and all that's left is to tell which one is towards the center of the galaxy, which is when you fall back on the obvious method as the way to pick between the four more precise answers.  Basically, if you had a big compass engraved on a stone on the ground without any directions marked, having someone tell you that "North is that-away" gesturing in some direction will tell you which of the directions on the compass is north.\n\nOne interesting thing to note is that today our telescopes have improved to the point where we can take pictures of the center of the galaxy and see stars moving around it very quickly.  If we didn't know where the center of the galaxy was and had those pictures we could make a pretty good guess and say that that's where the center of the galaxy is.
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DRFUN96...he da man!\n\nGood thing Yahoo Answers doesn't subtract points for wrong answers or most of the people who "answered" this question would be in the minus numbers. Maybe this is where the saying "Ignorance is bliss" came from.\n\nOur sun is moving around (orbiting) the Milky Way Galaxy at some 560,000 miles per hour. One orbit takes about 226-million years.
684620
Some interesting galaxy names:  Milky Way, Andromeda, Tadpole, Whirlpool, Sombrero, Black Eye, Draco Dwarf, Fornax, Triangulum, Spider, Zwicky.
22208
The Milky Way is the galaxy we live in. Our Solar System is inside some constelation within the galaxy. A Galaxy has millions of stars and Solar Systems.\n\nThe sun is far from being the origin of the Big Bang. It's just a REALLY REALLY small part of it.\n\nOh, Milky Way is also a chocolate bar.
362021
We can only give a rough guess as to how many galaxies there are, and it's billions at least. All but the closest ones visible as galaxies to the naked eye have names. Our local galaxy is the Milky Way, which you can see in a dark place on a clear night as a streak of stars running across the sky. A cluster is a group of galaxies.\n\nSome galaxies we have discovered with Hubble and other new telescopes seem to crashing into each other, and the Milky Way may be on its way to having a galactic interloper in the far future.
752780
milky way is our own galaxy.sThe compositions of stars are determined through spectroscopy. Spectroscopy is the study of something using spectra. Recall from the electromagnetic radiation chapter that a spectrum is what results when you spread starlight out into its individual colors. By noting what absorption lines (or sometimes, emission lines) are present and their strengths, you can find out a tremendous amount of information. Stars have absorption lines patterns similar to the Sun. This means that they are composed mostly of hydrogen and helium with traces of other elements. \n\nFrom these absorption lines you learn some important things beside the star's composition: \n\nStructure of stars: From the simple fact that you see absorption lines in most stellar spectra, you know that the stars must have a hot dense part that produces a continuous spectrum and an outer layer, or atmosphere, made of cooler, low density gas. The general trend is density and temperature of stars decreases as the distance from the star's center increases. The hot dense part is also gaseous because of the extreme temperatures. Stars have no molten rock in them like the interiors of some of the planets. \nmass of stars:\nTo determine the masses of stars, Kepler's third law is applied to the motions of binary stars---two stars orbiting a common point. The greater the combined mass of the two stars, the greater the gravity acceleration is, and, therefore, the smaller their orbital period. A majority of the several hundred billion stars in the Galaxy are in a system with two or more stars orbiting each other. Usually the binary stars are spectroscopic binary stars. A spectroscopic binary system is two stars orbiting a common point at too great a distance away from us to resolve the two stars individually, but whose binary nature is indicated in the periodic shift of their spectral lines as they orbit around each other. Spectroscopic binary stars are used because (a) there are a lot more far away stars than nearby ones and (b) more importantly, you can easily measure their speeds from the doppler shifted lines. \ncolour of star:\nHot stars appear bluer than cooler stars. Cooler stars are redder than hotter stars. The ``B-V color index'' is a way of quantifying this using two different filters; one a blue (B) filter that only lets a narrow range of colors or wavelengths through centered on the blue colors, and a ``visual'' (V) filter that only lets the wavelengths close to the green-yellow band through. \nA hot star has a B-V color index close to 0 or negative, while a cool star has a B-V color index close to 2.0. Other stars are somewhere in between. Here are the steps to determine the B-V color index: \n\nMeasure the apparent brightness (flux) with two different filters (B, V). \nThe flux of energy passing through the filter tells you the magnitude (brightness) at the wavelength of the filter. \nCompute the magnitude difference of the two filters, B - V. \n\nok thats all,