Flash Post 232!

What exactly is this?

Button, it’s a cluster of 3000 stars in the constellation Carina. It’s around 2 million years old, which in stellar terms, is very young!

What does stellar and constellation mean?

Stellar means going by “star standard” and constellation means “any of the various groups of stars”.

And what is a galaxy?

It’s a collection of millions or billions of stars, planets, gas and dust held together by gravity. The galaxy that has our planet, the sun and stars orbiting round it is called the Milky Way.

That’s so interesting.

Go out on to the terrace and look up. You might see a milky haze arching across the sky. That is the Milky Way. It has anywhere between 100-400 billion stars but the number of stars you can see from any part of the globe with your naked eyes or through a telescope is roughly around 2,500. This is not a fixed number though because the Milky Way loses stars through supernovae and keeps adding new ones which would be around 7 each year.

What is supernova?

It is an astronomical event that occurs during the last stages of evolution of big stars where it’s dramatic and catastrophic demise is marked by a massive explosion.

This is really interesting. Tell me some more please.

If the age of the universe is 13.7 billions years, the Milky Way is almost as old at 13.6 billion years. It’s also on the move all the time–the sun moves around the earth. The earth moves around The Milky Way and this goes on and on.