Today, any schoolchild knows what our galaxy is called. But that was not always the case. The Milky Way - a vast empire consisting of hundreds of billions of gravitationally coupled stellar systems - is our cosmic Homeland. He always attracted the attention of mankind and aroused his burning interest. Almost all ancient peoples and states had their own answer to the question of what is the name of our galaxy.
In some countries of the ancient world, the Milky Way was called the Road of the Gods, in others - the Star Bridge. For example, in ancient China, the name "Heavenly River" was used. There was no unity on this issue then. But in any case, in all corners of the ancient world, the Milky Way was considered sacred. Temples were built in his honor, he was worshiped.
The scientific history of the study of the Milky Way is at least two thousand years. And now it is considered inconceivable not to know what our galaxy is called, because the fateful questions about how life began and what awaits us in the future are inseparable from this concept. In the foreseeable part of the Universe alone, there are about two hundred billion galaxies.
Each of them is unique in its structure, huge in size and constantly in motion. Galaxies are aggressive. They are born as a result of tremendous cosmic disasters and die the same violent death. Galaxies are a real star cradle. The stars that give life to our Universe, illuminate and heat it, are born in huge galactic accumulations of gas and dust, this building material of all the heavenly bodies.
One of such incredible gigantic space formations is our star house - the Milky Way. For most of the scientific history of mankind, there was no unity on the question of what our galaxy is called. Moreover, for a long time, scientists considered the Milky Way the only galaxy in the Universe, a sort of island of prosperity in the vast and lifeless cosmic ocean.
But in 1924, Erwin Hubble, observing the starry sky with the most advanced telescope of that time, changed the general idea. He noticed obscure clouds of light deep in space and concluded that he had discovered not single objects, but entire star conglomerates outside the Milky Way. Thus, Hubble made a revolution in astronomy and brought to a new level the study of the structure of our galactic house.
The Milky Way belongs to the spiral, the most common type of star clusters. The structure of our galaxy and the great secrets of the Universe are now becoming more accessible to the human eye thanks to modern telescopes and unmanned space vehicles that regularly transmit the collected data to Earth.
So, we already learned that the distribution of stars has one characteristic and pronounced feature, which consists in the fact that their concentration increases significantly as we approach the galactic center. This allowed scientists to conclude that there is a supermassive body in the center that has incredibly powerful gravity.
The center of our galaxy, located in the constellation Sagittarius, seems to be occupied by a monstrous size black hole. In any case, this is the only reasonable explanation that modern science can give such a distribution of stars. In the future, our galaxy is waiting for a powerful cosmic cataclysm - a collision with the Andromeda galaxy, towards which we are rushing rapidly. As a result of this catastrophe, Andromeda, which is much larger than the Milky Way, will swallow our starry abode, which will cease to exist, but instead a new galaxy will form. And the evolution of the universe will continue ...