Milky Way Structure

Our "hometown" is a vast, flat, disk-shaped collection of gas, dust, and stars called ___

• the Andromeda Galaxy

• the Milky Way Galaxy

• the Large Magellanic Cloud

• the Triangulum Galaxy

How far is it across the Milky Way Galaxy?

• 100 light years across

• 1,000 light years across

• 10,000 light years across

• 100,000 light years across

How many stars are in the Milky Way Galaxy?

• tens of millions

• hundreds of millions

• tens of billions

• hundreds of billions

Where are we, Earthlings, located in the Milky Way Galaxy?

• precisely at the center

• near the center

• halfway out from the center

• at the outer edge

How many major spiral arms are in the Milky Way Galaxy?

• one

• two

• three

• four

The elongated, roughly cylindrical bar at the center of our galaxy is composed mostly of ___

• young blue stars

• old blue stars

• young red stars

• old red stars

Tags

NGSS.HS-ESS1-3

The ancient Greeks called the glowing pathway of stars in the sky "galaxius", which means ___

• river

• glowing

• path of light

• milky

Tags

NGSS.MS-ESS1-1

Which astronomer discovered that the glowing cloudy Milky Way was actually made up of stars?

• Isaac Newton

• Tycho Brahe

• Galileo Galilei

• Johannes Kepler

Early maps of the galaxy, which placed the Sun near the center, didn't account for ___

• black holes

• interstellar dust

• globular clusters

• neutron stars

What "spherical balls of stars" helped determine that the Sun wasn't at the center of the galaxy?

• globular clusters

• Magellanic clouds

• open clusters

• ball nebula