Or, a long, tube-like sample drilled down into ice, soil or rock. These may have been snagged from other galaxies that got too close.īlack hole: A region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation (including light) can escape.Ĭore: Something - usually round-shaped - in the center of an object. The Milky Way’s halo is also dotted with stars made of normal matter. (This invisible stuff makes up most of the matter in the universe.) Though it cannot be seen directly, dark matter in the Milky Way’s halo gravitationally pulls on the galaxy’s visible stars. Most of that halo is made up of dark matter. Instead, it lurks in a roughly spherical “halo” that surrounds the spiral. Most of the matter in the Milky Way, though, doesn’t lie in the galaxy’s disk at all. That dense core weighs as much as 4 million suns and frantically sucks up surrounding material. But they may have been blasted out by activity near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The origins of these “ Fermi bubbles,” which are each about 25,000 light-years tall, remain mysterious. What’s more, the disk of the Milky Way is sandwiched between two huge blobs of gas. Some ripples at the galaxy’s outer edges were likely kicked up by a smaller galaxy running into the Milky Way long ago. See all the entries from our Let’s Learn About seriesįor instance, recent data hint that the Milky Way’s disk is not totally flat. And charting the details of the galaxy’s structure can offer clues about its unique history. But the Milky Way is no simple stellar pancake. As a large spiral galaxy, much of the Milky Way’s matter is packed into a disk about 100,000 light-years across. In illustrations, our home galaxy is often shown as a huge pinwheel of stars - and that’s certainly part of the picture. It’s the massive bunch of stars, gas and dust where Earth orbits the sun. The Milky Way galaxy is our cosmic home sweet home. Have feedback on the audio version of this story? Let us know!
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