The Milky Way is one of the most fascinating and mysterious objects in the universe. It is a spiral galaxy that contains hundreds of billions of stars and is home to our Solar System.
The Milky Way is so large that it would take light more than 100,000 years to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other.
Astronomers believe that the Milky Way galaxy was formed at the same time as the Big Bang. However, the newly created galaxy was in chaos, and blue giants with short lifetimes were constantly being created. Its motion was not very regular either.
After more than 2 billion years of orbit, the center of the galaxy did not stabilize until about 11.2 billion years ago.
In the inner part of the galaxy, new stars with very large masses are formed due to the high density of hydrogen and helium gas. After these stars have completely burned and collapsed, they form extremely massive white dwarfs.
Because these white dwarfs are so massive, the surrounding matter is constantly attracted to them, which in turn increases their collapse, becoming smaller, denser, and more gravitational, as well as producing a very strong magnetic field.
In the end, even photons cannot escape the gravitational pull of these white dwarfs. No matter what instruments are used to detect them, the result is an abyss of blackness. The German scientist Carl Schwarzy called such an object a "black hole".
The Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope, launched in the United States in 2008, largely proves this point.
Scientists believe that the matter inside a black hole is spinning rapidly, forming a strong magnetic field. It is the strong magnetic field of the black hole that drives the surrounding hydrogen, helium, dust, and newly formed stars to rotate and move together.
Some scientists used to think that the matter forming a black hole would never come out and was the ultimate form of matter. But Hawking published the black hole evaporation theory in 1975 and gave the formula.
Not many scientists believed it at the time. However, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, launched by NASA, found large bubbles 2,500 light-years in diameter at both ends of the black hole in the Milky Way, suggesting that material would be ejected at high speed at the edge of the black hole.
This also coincides with Hawking's theory of black hole evaporation.
The Milky Way is a representative of a common disk galaxy among countless cosmic islands. Like other similar galaxies, it contains hundreds of billions of stars.
These stars are roughly distributed among several characteristic structures, the most important of which are the nuclear sphere at the center of the galaxy, the flattened silver disk, and the silver halo that surrounds it.
Of these, the silver disk actually consists of a geometrically thicker disk and a geometrically thinner and more extended disk. The thick disk is mainly in the inner part of the galaxy and appears tangentially as a rugby ball, which is the center of activity for the older stars.
The thin disk extends like a sandwich from the interior to the ends and thickens at the edges, where gas, dust, and young stars gather. The periphery of the disk is surrounded by a spherical structure of silver halos, which makes the area sparsely populated.
However, since humans are in the middle of the Milky Way, it is still unclear how the Milky Way is structured and what kind of relationship it has with the Sun.
