Page 10 - Spirit of Islam-May'17
P. 10
THE GALAXY SPEAKS
ABOUT ITS CREATOR
How Great Thou Art!
CCORDING to a new study, the Milky Way is at least 50%
bigger than previously estimated. Research conducted by an
Ainternational 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
years to 150,000 light years.
2
The Milky Way Galaxy
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a unique astronomical phenomenon of
which our solar system is only a tiny part. Until the early 1920's, most
astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the
universe. Edwin Hubble in the early 1920's with his new telescope was
able to produce astronomical photographs that resolved the outer
parts of some spiral nebulae as collections of individual stars. He was
also able to estimate the distance to the nebulae and found that they
were far too distant to be part of the Milky Way.
2 Light year = distance that light can travel in one year = 9,500,000,000,000 kilometres.
8 Spirit of Islam Issue 53 May 2017
