The Voyage spacecraft are the first human made objects to head out of our solar system, into interstellar space, across our galaxy (Fun Fact: Did you know that voyager 1 launched AFTER voyager 2? voyager 2 was supposed to see all the planets first, before travelling to interstellar space. so, voyager 1 beat voyager 2 🙂 ). When we marvel at our own solar system, its easy to forget how small we all are. think about it:
You are a human (assuming, of course, that you are NOT a penguin).
You are sharing a rock, with 7 billion other people.
That rock is hurtling through space around a BIG ball of plasma that is 333, 060 times bigger, and 15 million ºC in temperature.
That ball is a medium “Main Sequence” star, AKA a yellow dwarf, AKA a G2V type star, AKA “The Sun”, which means that there are bigger stars in the universe.
And that star (“The sun”) is just one in 400 billion in the Milky Way.
And the Milky Way is just one in TRILLIONS(or more) galaxies in the universe, separated by hundreds of THOUSANDS of light years of empty S P A C E.
Feeling small yet?
(Well, my penguin doesn’t seem so…)
So, while you’re wondering if we will ever reach other galaxies, it would be nice to know the TYPES of galaxies.
Irregular:
these dont have a defined shape, and make up about 5% of all the galaxies in the WORL- I mean, the universe. (Unless you have a tiny model of a universe.)
Elliptical:
These are sort of boring. The largest galaxies are elliptical. most are Oval, but some are spherical!
Spiral:
These are about a fifth of all galaxies, including our own! they have flat rotating disks with a large bulge in the middle.
Cool!
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