7 Lesser Known Facts About Milky Way Galaxy

The Milky Way is our home galaxy, although we have known about its existence for a long time we’re as clueless about it and still, we can say we know a lot already, following are some of the known things:-

1. Milky Way Has A Satellite Galaxy

The Milky Way is known to have its own personal satellite galaxy, called The Large Magellanic Cloud or the Nubecula Major. It is the second or third-closest closest galaxy to ours. The first confirmed record of this galaxy is said to be in 1503-1504v by Amerigo Vespucci in a letter where he described it as a ‘bright Canope’. It has a prominent central bar and a spiral arm. Like many irregular galaxies, it is rich in gas and dust and is currently undergoing vigorous star formation activity.

2. There’s A Super Massive Black Hole Right At the Centre

At the very centre of our galaxy lies a black hole, we’re aware of the presence of it because stars near the centre, orbit around an area at massive speeds, something which can only be possible by an entity of a mass that is four million times more than that of the Sun. If there happens to be something that big with such power that does not emit any light, it’s a black hole. But even though it’s big we don’t need to worry about it as our galaxy is way bigger.

3. It’s Cannibalistic

Galaxies eat other galaxies if a smaller one passes too close to them. The bigger galaxy rips the smaller one into pieces in its own way and ingests it stars and gases. The Milky Way is currently ‘eating’ a lot of galaxies, the thing is, with each smaller galaxy it eats, it gets bigger, hence reaching further in space and coming in contact with more new smaller galaxies and ending up consuming them too.

4. It’s Mostly Dark Matter

Scientifically, everything in the galaxy has its own mass, with some maths and physics you can calculate how much mass the galaxy actually carries on a whole. But even after adding the mass of everything that is known to us as visible things in the galaxy, the stars, gases, dust etc. the two numbers don’t match, in fact, it only accounts for 10% of all of it.

The other 90%, which is not visible to us, is referred to as dark matter. We don’t know exactly what it is yet but that is what the majority is around us, it’s invisible.

5. We Haven’t ‘Seen’ The Milky Way

We don’t really know what our galaxy looks like exactly, this is due to the fact that we can’t take a picture of our galaxy yet. It is because we are inside the galactic disk, which is about 26,000 light years from the galactic centre, from where we could actually get a fair enough image. This means that all the pictures we see of the Milky Way galaxy are actually either of some other spiral galaxy or just a really well-made artistic image. 

6. Skeleton Remains Of Galaxies

Scientists have debated that when a bigger galaxy eats a smaller galaxy by the merging process like ours does, it always leaves behind quite a few long, slender streams of stars that are ejected from them and are no longer gravitationally bound to the merged galaxy.

They say that with the right research and efforts we might be able to identify these several floating specific filaments or streams, usually referred to as ‘skeletons’ of galaxies or ‘bones’, which are the true remnants of the eaten-up galaxies and trace back the origins of our galaxy and its journey all the way till this point. 

7. Milky Way galaxy is Barred

Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, these galaxies account for about 60% of the ones people can see, spiral galaxies are either the normal or barred type, the Milky Way happens to be barred, which means it has a bar of stars passing through the centre bulge and nucleus. The difference is, in normal spiral galaxies, there is no centralised bar whereas, in ours, the galaxy’s arms typically begin at the end of bars. 

Researchers predicted that the Milky Way’s central bar is not moving as fast as it used to, however, they confirmed that for the first time in 2021, more specifically, it has slowed about a quarter over its existence. The scientists said dark matter functions like a counterweight to affect how fast the centre bar spins, these conclusions were made after examining data from the Gaia space telescope, which was from a large group of stars called the Hercules stream, a key point is that they revolve around the galaxy at the same rate as the Milky Way’s bar.

Written By: Sofia Choudhary

Edited By: Nidhi Jha