Galaxy Essay, Research Paper

A galaxy is a huge collection of dust, gases and stars. Formed soon after the birth of a universe and held together, a galaxy is constantly voyaging through space. Galaxies vary in size. There are four different kinds of galaxies. There are Spiral, Barred Spiral, Elipitical and Irregular. My favorite one is Elipitical because it looks like a planet with rings.

The Magellanic Clouds are the closest galaxies to us. They are about 200,000 light years away. Magellanic Clouds can be seen by the naked eye.

The Andromeda galaxy is the nearest galaxy beyond the Milky Way, but at twenty-two million light years, it is also the farthest object seen by the naked eye. A small telescope can also see it. The Andromeda galaxy has an estimated 300,000,000,000 solar masses and a diameter of 130,000 light years.

The Milky Way is a band of faint light that stretches above the night sky. The Milky Way is made up of millions of stars. The Milky Way can only be seen by the Telescope, other wise it would look like plain stars.

Spiral galaxies are rich in dust and gas. Some that are viewed face-on so the arms are easy to see, where others can be viewed edge-on. Some Spiral Galaxies are NGC 1365 and Spiral NGC 300. These are the four Galaxies:

1. Barred Spiral- A bright band or bar of stars runs through the middle of spiral galaxies and gets arms growing out of the center.

2. Elipitical- A disk shaped galaxy, the most common normal galaxy, the stars are also extremely old.

3. Irregular- Some galaxies such as the large Megallanic are called irregular because they have no clear shape.

4. Spiral- Spiral Galaxies have a large flat disk with spiral arms that usually contain bright young stars.

Therefore, galaxies can be very interesting. After all there are mysteries beyond our boundries, things happening beyond our visual capabilities, things that will be discovered in years to come. I for one am looking forward to new discoveries within our Universe.