Our Milky Way Galaxy is a thing of awesome beauty! It is like
a vast, jewel-covered, merry-go-round spinning in space, and you
are on it! It has huge neon-red stars that are like immense rubies.
There are blue-white stars burning with a fierce intensity that
makes even the most precious diamonds look pale in comparison.
The Milky Way Galaxy has emerald-green colored stars too. In fact,
the stellar "jewels" can be any color of the rainbow,
depending on their temperature (blue = hotter and red = cooler).
Sometimes the "jewels" explode in humongous fireworks
displays called supernovae. Better stay at least a billion miles
away from one of these firecrackers -- they make a nuclear bomb
seem like a baby's burp in comparison.
Soaring all around our galaxy are things that, from our distance, look like
fuzzy snowballs, but instead of ice particles they are made up of hundreds of
thousands of stars, all packed into a dense "starball." Their real
name is Globular Clusters, and they buzz around the Galaxy's center like bees
around a hive (see the bigger red dots in
galaxy picture above, and the actual photo reproduction in the examples
section).
Our merry-go-round galaxy contains billions of tons of gold and silver, but alas, it's hidden within a lot of less interesting stuff. About 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons is the "weight" of our Milky Way Galaxy. Scientists write big numbers like this in a shortened way: 1x1039, which means a 1 followed by 39 zeros. Go ahead, count'em. Now , that's heavy! Nearly all of it is made up of hydrogen and helium, but in various places (like Earth) you can also find sizeable concentrations of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and even gold.
You cannot control the galactic merry-go-round, or get off, but you can own this glittering miracle of nature. I don't mean that you can buy it in a store and keep it under your bed (even if your parents cleaned out all the stuff that's already there), but you can own it. I'm serious -- there is a way that the Milky Way Galaxy can be yours. It's not that easy to do, but our friend Blasto will help you to discover how, as he and his illustrious leader, Galaxy Man, take you on a valiant quest to the heart of our galactic merry-go-round, and then on to its outer fringes in search of truth, justice and decent pizza!
Let's hook up this monitor to the powerful telescope over in that observatory, and maybe we can find our heroes. They last reported in from the nuclear bulge of our Galaxy, towards its center.
Hey! There they are now! Or, I should probably say, were. You see, when we look deep into space we are looking back in time. That's because the light we see takes time to come from there to here. Think about it. The farther out we look, the longer ago the light left the thing we are looking at, and has been travelling towards us. Like, when we see the Sun, we are seeing light that left the Sun about 8 minutes before we looked. Or consider an exploding star that is 10 light years away. For 10 years we wouldn't be able to see or know about the explosion. When we see our neighboring galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, we see light that has been travelling for about 1 million years and that light shows us how Andromeda looked nearly 1 million years ago! It's wierd, but that's the kind of strange thing that can happen when you deal with reeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaalllly BIG distances.
If we were located at the right distance from the Earth, and had
an impossibly powerful telescope/monitor setup, then we could
watch television shows that were first broadcast 40 years ago,
or the Rugrats program we missed back in November. We could listen
to the famous baseball game in which Babe Ruth hit his even more
famous homerun - the one where he pointed to the most distant
seats and then hit it there.
Anyway, there's Galaxy Man and Blasto, and you are invited on a heroic 1,000,000 mile per hour crusade across the Galaxy in an alien spaceship. Galaxy Man is a droid who, by bizarre accidents and a lot of dumb luck, was promoted to the rank of Captain in the Galactic Patrol. Though it may seem a bit preposterous, he is a descendent of that illustrious knight in shining armor, Don Quixote!
His faithful young companion, Blasto, regularly saves Galaxy Man
from being turned into a molten puddle of iron and silicon. We
see them just as they were about to start out on their most recent
adventure - THE ADVENTURE OF THE RED GIANTS!
