• Question: What is the milky way?

    Asked by cookielivi2 to Pip on 7 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Pip Millington

      Pip Millington answered on 7 Nov 2016:

      In one sense the milky way is our neighbourhood.

      Galaxies are large collections of stars. The milky way is the galaxy that our sun is part of – just one of over 100,000,000,000 stars. It’s fair to say I used the word “neighbourhood” in a loose sense. If you tried to walk from one edge of the milky way to the other it would take you 20,000,000,000,000 years or longer than it would take to count the grains of sand in the world one by one.

      Space is big.

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