Astronomy - Top 10 facts about galaxies
THE superhero-packed film Guardians Of The Galaxy has been launched this week on Blu-ray, 3D Blu-ray, DVD and Digital formats.
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1. There are close to 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe, each comprising billions of stars orbiting the galaxy’s centre of mass.
2. These range from dwarf galaxies with as few as ten million stars to giant galaxies with a 100 trillion stars.
3. Our Sun completes an orbit of the Milky Way galaxy about once every 225million years.
4. On this orbit, it travels at a speed of about 220km (140 miles) per second.
5. The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy, shaped like a spiral with a bar across its centre.
6. The Milky Way’s nearest neighbour is the Andromeda Galaxy which is about 2.5 million light years (that’s 15 million trillion miles) away.
7. In about 4.5 billion years’ time, the Milky Way is expected to collide with Andromeda.
8. The word galaxy comes from an ancient Greek word for milky (as in lactic). They called the Milky Way a milky circle.
9. In 1940, a cartoon called The Milky Way became the first non-Disney animation to win an Oscar.
10. Edwin Hubble, in the 1920s, was first to confirm that the Milky Way was just one of many galaxies.
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