All rights reserved. Personality Quizzes. Funny Fill-In. Amazing Animals. Weird But True! Party Animals. Try This! Explore More. An illustration shows the spiral shape of the Milky Way galaxy. Space videos. Now Playing. Outer This World. Up Next. Planet Earth. I saw this question on Quizlet which said:. The Milky Way is a fairly narrow band of faint diffuse light around the celestial sphere. The Milky Way Galaxy is a spiral galaxy of about billion stars.
Why is there a difference? If there is a difference, could one include graphs that show the difference between the two? The two words being interchangeable is a narrow view that only one well versed in Astronomy can have, and doesn't fit the reality of how ordinary people view it, being the circa 10 10 people who have seen the Milky Way but never having been formally taught about galaxies.
Anyone can gaze at the sky on a dark night and know what the Milky Way is without any connection or reference to the concept of a galaxy or even that the Earth orbits the Sun.
The Milky Way is what anybody who looks up on a dark night sees, regardless of science. What at least sighted folks can agree on is that The Milky Way is up there, and what scientists and lay people can tend to agree upon is that it is our galaxy. We live in a disk-shaped galaxy, which is interchangeably called "the Milky Way", "the Milky Way Galaxy", or "the Galaxy" capitalized to differentiate it from other galaxies. Viewed from inside, it looks to us as a narrow, diffuse band of light because we see more stars along the disk than away from the disk.
That phenomenon is called "the Milky Way", and has indeed been called that for thousands of years. But even calling the phenomenon "the Milky Way Galaxy" would not offend any astronomers, I think. Although you could argue that everything you see on the sky is part of the Galaxy, excluding a handful of fuzzy blobs. All the various answers are making the same correct point in different ways, but I still can't resist saying this:. When you are talking about galaxies, and you want to specify our own, you can say either "the Milky Way" or "the Milky Way Galaxy.
The pale stripe you can see in the sky is normally just called "the Milky Way. Also, historically, that stripe was often called just "the Galaxy. But, when you are talking about different galaxies, saying "Milky Way Galaxy" is not redundant.
A lot of people vaguely call The Milky Way Galaxy simply the Milky Way, but I don't approve of such vague speech which blurs the distinction between two separate things. The Milky Way is a faint band of light in the night sky, which can been seen where the background sky is dark enough. Just like the sky is more or less an illusion. There is a relatively thin layer of atmosphere over the surface of the Earth, and above that an almost total vacuum extending to infinity which is called outer space.
In the daytime, atmospheric molecules reflect and scatter sunlight, so the blu elight coming from every direction makes it look like there is a solid dome above us which is called the sky.
At night, there is no reflected sunlight, and the atmosphere is almost totally transparent, and we can see through it to the vacuum of outer space, which is black except where light from distant shining objects reaches Earth. Most of the shining objects seen at night are stars, which have greater or lesser absolute luminosities and which are at nearer or farther distances from Earth, and thus have greater or lesser apaprent brightness as seen from Earth. There are a few thousand individual stars that humans can see in the night sky without telescopes, amd millions of others that can bee seen with binoculars and telescopes.
And the light of many millions of distant stars is blended together to make the light of the Mikly Way. The Milky Way Galaxy is a galaxy of billions of stars. It is believed that a bubble that was extremely hot and dense exploded and then exploded particles formed the various astronomical objects.
Galaxies were also formed as a result of this explosion. Milky Way is a type of spiral Galaxy and it contains our solar system. It is supposed to be consisted of about billion stars. It has been given the name 'Milky Way', as it appears as a dim glowing band. A renowned astronomer, Edwin Powell Hubble in the year , determined that there are other galaxies that are also present in the Universe, apart from our Milky Way. Earlier, the assumption was that Milky Way is the only Galaxy present in the Universe.
Milky Way measures about , light years across. Our solar system is placed about light years to the galactic center. A glimpse of the galaxy could be seen in a dark night with the help of binoculars or a small telescope.
The band primarily contains stars and thus the combined light is obtained in the form of a dim glow. Milky Way has various stars, enough gas and dust, and thus has the potential of making more stars even in billions. Some of the specifications are listed below A Galaxy is a group of stars, dust and other astronomical matter that are held together by the force of gravity.
On the other hand, Milky Way is a spiral Galaxy that includes our solar system.
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