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| Zoom Astronomy The Stars |
| Lifecycle | Nuclear Fusion | Brightest Stars | Galaxies | Other Solar Systems | Constellations | Why Stars Twinkle | |
| Birth | Death | Star Types | Closest Stars | Nebulae | Major Stars | The Zodiac | Activities, Links |
| Spiral Galaxies | Elliptical Galaxies | Irregular Galaxies | Lenticular Galaxies | Active Galaxies | Clusters of Galaxies |
A galaxy is a huge group of stars, dust, gas, and other celestial bodies bound together by gravitational forces. There are spiral, elliptical, and irregularly shaped galaxies. Galaxies contain anywhere from 100,000 to 3,000,000,000,000 stars.
There are three major types of galaxies: spiral (with arms), elliptical (no arm), and irregular (without rotational symmetry). Galaxies radiate a continuous spectrum of energy. Some radiate radio waves, X rays, and infrared, and ultraviolet (UV) radiation.
The Earth, Sun and the rest of our solar system are a tiny part of the Milky Way Galaxy, a spiral galaxy.
The Milky way Galaxy is just one galaxy in a group of galaxies called the Local Group. Within the Local Group, the Milky Way Galaxy is moving about 300 km/sec (towards the constellation Virgo).
The galaxy that is nearest to our galaxy may is the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy, which is about 24 kiloparsecs or 80,000 light years from us. The Large Magellanic Cloud is another close galaxy; it is about 50 kiloparsecs from us.
Galaxy Links:
Make a galaxy of stars from glitter or sand on black paper
Questions and Answers about the Milky Way Galaxy and other galaxies from NASA
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