An Analysis Of The Milky Way Galaxy

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Introduction
At the beginning of the course we were asked to choose a “Cosmic Target”, which is something in space that we wanted to know more about. I chose the Milky Way Galaxy as a single unit. I wanted to know why it was, what it was and where it was going. All of us of course know where the Milky Way is, it is our home. A part of our cosmic address, and up until recently it was the biggest thing that we could imagine. As far as where it is in the universe, it is in The Local group, which is a sub-cluster, located in the Virgo Super Cluster. All of this is somewhere around 13 Billion years after the Big Bang.
History of Discovery
Democritus, a pre-socratic philosopher, is credited with first hypothesizing that the bright band which runs across the night sky may be a close cluster of stars. Democritus lived around the year 400 BC. It wasn’t until the 17th century that Galileo Galilei provided proof that the galaxy was made up of many stars, using an early telescope. Then in the 18th century a man name Thomas Wright postulated that the galaxy what actually a gigantic rotating clus...

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