Things Inside Our Milky Way Galaxy

...but outside of our Solar System

If you have ever gone camping or spent the night at a place where there was a very dark sky, you may have had the good fortune to see a cloud-like band stretcng across the sky. It was not really a cloud, but the Milky Way galaxy, with stars so numerous and so distant that they look like a cloud.

Our Sun is just one of the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Without a telescope, all the stars you can see in the sky are in the Milky Way galaxy. When you start using a telescope, you find some things in our galaxy that are not just stars...

There are many gas clouds in the Milky Way.

They are called nebulae.

Click on the pictures below to see bigger versions.

Some nebulae are places where stars are born...

Some nebulae are places where stars are dying...

This is the Ring Nebula (M57). It is forming as the star in the center is growing old and dying. The star pushes out shells of gas--the gas shell appears as a ring. It is less than 2,000 Light-Years away. Such nebulae are called planetary nebulae, because the first observers to see them thought they looked like planets through their not-so-powerful telescopes.

Some nebulae are places where stars blew up!

This nebula, the Crab Nebula (M1), is the remains of a supernova--a star that exploded in 1066 A.D. Supernova explosions are some of the most powerful explosions in the universe. The Crab Nebula is about 6,000 Light-Years away

.....:::::.... Lawrence Hall of Science -- University of California, Berkeley.

Questions? Ask Alan Gould
Last updated 06/23/2004