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Home galaxy of Earth, the Milky Way is a spiral-shaped system of a few hundred billion stars. Bright regions of recently formed stars highlight its arms, while older stars explode or expel their outer layers as beautiful planetary nebulae, then fade away and die.
A thick swarm of orange and red stars marks the galactic bulge, encapsulating the star-packed galactic center. At its core may lie a black hole, a region so dense that not even light can escape its gravitational pull.
All objects in the Milky Way orbit the galactic center, much like planets in Earth's solar system revolve around the sun. But the scale is staggering: Light from a star at one edge of the galaxy takes about 100,000 years to reach the opposite side.



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TheUniverse.jpg.zip

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As far as we can see with our ever improving telescopes, there're at least a hundred billion galaxies arrayed throughout the universe. Each, like the Milky Way, is an "island universe" containing billions of stars.
Nearly all galaxies are members of groups or clusters, which are part of even larger structures called superclusters. All of these large concentrations are connected by filaments or sheets of galaxies, which enclose huge, bubble-like volumes of empty space, the cosmic voids.

The great unifier of the cosmos is gravity. It holds the stars of a galaxy, and the galaxies of a cluster, together. But clusters, groups, and isolated individual galaxies are all flying away from each other, a continuing aftermath of the big bang, an explosion of space itself that astronomers believe formed the universe 11 to 15 billion years ago.

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