THE GALAXY SPEAKS ABOUT ITS CREATOR

THE GALAXY SPEAKS ABOUT ITS CREATOR How Great Thou Art! 1 Light year = distance that light can travel in one year = 9,500,000,000,000 kilometres. A CCORDING to a recent study, the Milky Way is at least 50% bigger than previously estimated. Research conducted by an international team at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the US has established the presence of a bulging ring of stars beyond the known plane of the Milky Way. Their findings show that the features previously identified as rings are actually part of the galactic disk, extending across the known width of the Milky Way from 100,000 light years1 to 150,000 light years. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a unique astronomical phenomenon of which our Solar System is only a tiny part. Until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the universe. Edwin Hubble in the early 1920s with his new telescope was able to produce astronomical photographs that resolved the outer parts of some spiral nebulae as collections of individual stars. A nebula is a giant cloud of dust and gas in space. He was also able to conclusively estimate the distance to the nebulae and found that they were far too distant to be part of the Milky Way.