Galaxies

Galaxies are one of the most interesting things in space. They are all filled up with stars, planets, and dust. Did you know that you are made of star dust because our galaxy is filled with dust? Comets are falling on earth all the time spreading this dust.

Galaxies, as you know are made of stars, planets, and dust. They flood the universe together. Every few light years, galaxies are seen. NASA even found a nearly habitable solar system in the Milky Way. It has a planet with plants, but they have not seen water, yet. Even if there was water the star is much too young and dim to live in. All galaxies keep their stars, planets, and star dust together with gravity. They keep these things because it is held together by gravity. Gravity is a galaxy’s best friend. Galaxies are huge and seem endless! Even after so much research and space travel, we still do not know where our galaxy ends.

As you know we live in the Milky Way galaxy. Do you know that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy? A spiral galaxy looks like an octopus, with its “arms” swinging around. We live on one of the outer part of an “arm” in the Milky Way. There are three main kinds of galaxies. Spiral, irregular, and elliptical. An irregular galaxy is a galaxy with no proper shape. Hence the word irregular. A elliptical galaxy looks oval shaped, like an egg except flatter. It is important to classify galaxies’ features from each other.

There are millions of galaxies in the universe, but we can only see so many, specifically three galaxies. People who are north of the equator see the Andromeda Galaxy. This galaxy will crash into our galaxy in a few million years. The Andromeda Galaxy has a weird gravitational force. Instead of getting pushed backwards like all other galaxies, because of the power of the Big Bang. On the south equator people can see the large and small Magellanic Clouds. Although not much is known about them scientists think these galaxies are two of the brightest galaxies in our universe. You can’t exactly see these three galaxies properly. They look like small, hazy patches of light. We need to research more about these galaxies and see if we find intelligent life.

Galaxies have so many interesting facts about them. People have learned more about galaxies from 2015 than ever before! Galaxies are or one the most intriguing puzzle pieces to the biggest puzzle of all, the universe.