Our Galaxy: The Milky Way

How many of you are interested in space? I have always been facinated by it and several times in my life (in the spring/summer) I would sit out in the back porch and just look up at the sky & moon and just imagine how huge our universe is... and then... to think that that 'huge universe' is a small dot in our galaxy.

Planet earth is somewhere on the most outer ring on the galaxy. I watched a program called 'The Universe' and I was just in awe of how amazing the galaxy is. They compared it to our living conditions.... the center of the galaxy, that bright bright center of stars would be were everything is at and happening... (like a city of New York)... then the outer rings... as we go further out... would be the boonies (lol) where we are at..... so we can't really see all the action (other star formations, etc) BUT the positive thing about being that far out is that it lets us see our neighbor galaxies..... I think that is awesome.

Now as science becomes more and more advanced.... some are saying that we were most likely ADOPTED to the milky way galaxy. The picture below shows the yellow circle (our Sun) found directly between Milky Way [blue whirlpool] & Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxies [orange loop].



Pretty amazing ha? I sort of feel like an adult who's parents have told me that I was adopted all these years... lol
All this time, we though we were always with the Milky Way but now they are seeing that we actually were part of another galaxy.... :unsure:

Neat! My family watched a thing called, uhm, SHOOT! I can't think of the name of it! Ugh! I hate it when that happens!!! Anyway, it was about the earth, and where we are in it. It was really neat. Those are some awsome pictures!

Thanks for posting this, Carol! I've always loved astronomy. The really amazing thing is that there are about 100 billions stars in our Milky Way galaxy, each one more or less like our own sun. And they estimate that there are about 100 billion galaxies in the universe. They've already discovered many, many planets circling other nearby stars. So if you multiply 100 billion times 100 billion to find the total number of suns, and if only a small percentage of those have planets... well, I think it's pretty safe to say we're not alone.

That is really mind bogling... lol.. I can't even begin to express how huge the universe is.... amazing...

Carol, we bought "The Universe" on dvd for our boys for Christmas!

Rhonda wrote:

From Jan 1-Jan 5, there is a meteor shower going on. If you have a clear night, you might see if you can see it......

Cool, I'm going to check that out! I'm not so into space/astronomy, but my son is. And dahubby will get me to watch an occasional show on Discovery Channel, like the space show we watched together two nights ago. He's always trying to get me into things outside Little House, Dr. Quinn & X-Files!