Cosmic Ladder: Step 3 - Our Galactic Backyard
Our next step outward from our Solar System takes us to the stars. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is just over 4 light years away. A light year is the distance covered moving at the speed of light for one year, or roughly 5.9 trillion miles. As far as this is, we’re just getting started.
In fact, the very closest stars are the ones that we’ve identified as constellations, as anything much further requires optical aid such as a telescope or binoculars to make out, and even then there’s a resolution limit beyond which masses of stars spread out like an opaque veil rather than individual points of light.
The resolvable stars that make up most of the constellations are on the order of no more than a few dozen light years away. There are a few interesting features in our nearby space that are readily visible through a telescope, such as the Hercules Cluster and Great Orion Nebula. The famous cluster in Hercules is a mass of stars that have aggregated together in a globular shape, and the nebula in Orion is a region of interstellar gases that eventually create new stars, this particular region is the closest stellar nursery to Earth.
But that’s just the corner of the galaxy closest to us, tomorrow we’re stepping out further to look at the entire Milky Way!
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