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If you were on the top of a mountain, on a completely cloudless and moonless night, completely away from any artificial light you would be able to see no more than a couple of thousand individual stars without using a telescope. The Milky Way would be there as a bright band of light, and consisting of hundreds of billions of stars, too faint to be distinguished by the naked eye. The stars of the Milky Way make up a disc-shaped "island in space" called a Galaxy. But these stars are only faint because of their distance from us; each one can be as bright or brighter than our own Sun. We look at our Galaxy from the inside, where our Sun is just one unspectacular star amongst those hundreds of billions. We are nearer to the edge of our Galaxy than it's centre. Up until only a generation ago (the 1920's) it seemed that that's all there was in the Universe. But with the invention of newer and more powerful telescopes, astronomers discovered that those fuzzy blobs of light in the sky were in fact other galaxies lying far beyond the Milky Way. Our Galaxy was in fact just one mote of dust floating in a great sea. What's out there? How was it all created? When will it all end? These questions make astronomy and cosmology such an enthralling subject. |
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