Milky Way

“ But look forward: the luminous cloud to which we are urging our flight has expanded, until what, at one time, was a mere patch of brightness, has now swelled into a mighty star cluster; myriads of suns burst into sight—we have traversed a distance which even on the wings of light would take hundreds of thousands of years, and have reached the confines of another Milky Way as glorious and mighty as the one we have left ”

“ The Milky Way consists entirely of stars in countless numbers and of various magnitudes. The next object which I have observed is the essence or substance of the Milky Way. By the aid of a telescope any one may behold this in a manner which so distinctly appeals to the senses that all the disputes which have tormented philosophers through so many ages are exploded at once by the irrefragable evidence of our eyes, and we are freed from wordy disputes upon this subject, for the Galaxy is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters. ”

“ The Milky Way forms a girdle which, with more or less regularity, sweeps completely around the heavens; and when viewed with the telescope, is seen to consist of myriads of minute stars. In some places the stars are much more numerous than elsewhere. All these stars are incomparably more distant than the sun, which they surround, so it is evident that our sun and, of course, the system which attends him lie actually inside the Milky Way. ”

“ But he put forward a remarkable and original hypothesis to explain the Milky Way. He thought the sun to be smaller than the earth. Consequently, when the sun in its revolution passes below the earth, the shadow cast by the earth extends without limit. The trace of this shadow on the heavens is the Milky Way. The stars within this shadow are not interfered with by the light of the sun, and we therefore see them shining; those stars, on the other hand, which are outside the shadow are overpowered by the light of the sun which shines on them even during the night, so that we cannot see them. ”

“ The Milky Way is a warrambool, or water overflow; the stars are the fires, and the dusky haze the smoke from them, which spirits of the dead have lit on their journey across the sky. In their fires they are cooking the mussels they gather where they camp.
There is one old man up there who was once a great rainmaker, and when you see that he has turned round as the position of the Milky Way is altered, you may expect rain; he never moves except to make it. ”

“ Among all the strange things that the Milky Way contains there is nothing so extraordinary as itself. Every astronomer must many times have found himself marveling at it in those comparatively rare nights when it shows all its beauty and all its strangeness. In its great broken rifts, divisions, and spirals are found the gigantic prototypes of similar forms in its star-clouds and clusters. As we have said, it determines the general shape of the whole sidereal system. Some of the brightest stars in the sky appear to hang like jewels suspended at the ends of tassels dropped from the Galaxy. ”

“ The Milky Way is a gigantic cluster of suns, and if each sun has its planetary system about it, each system rides like a shining archipelago in these seas of space. Earth and all other planets, being dark in themselves, do not count in these burning distances. So then our sun is but a star, and the Milky Way is made up of millions of such stars. More than this, our sun is one of the many stars that compose this wonderful band of light. ”

“ For here, even more than between the planets, the stars lay before us in their true glory, undimmed by proximity to any one of them. A host of glittering points of fire, blue and green and white and red and yellow, they dotted the rayless skies thickly in all directions, and thronged like a great drift of swarming bees toward our upper left, where stretched the stupendous belt of the Milky Way. ”

“ There is now the further interest that as the sun and the solar system are included within the Milky Way, and as the Milky Way is a spiral, this earth of ours is itself at this moment a constituent part of a great spiral. ”

“ The Pleiades and the twenty millions of suns that form our own galaxy and the Milky Way, with all their varied colours, tints, and hues of white, golden, orange, ruby, red and blue, green and grey, silver, purple and yellow, buff and fawn, emerald and green, lilac and coppery. Thus we see the distant Orion, so far away that swift-footed Light, with its speed of more than eleven million miles per minute, has to travel for more than thirty thousand years before it spans the gulf that intervenes between it and us, and brings to us the news of its existence there. ”

“ The Heavens are full of surprises, on which we can bestow but a fleeting glance within these limits. They present a field of infinite variety.
Who has not noticed the Milky Way, the pale belt that traverses the entire firmament and is so luminous on clear evenings in the Constellations of the Swan and the Lyre? It is indeed a swarm of stars. Each is individually too small to excite our retina, but as a whole, curiously enough, they are perfectly visible. ”

“ On a clear night the human eye can perceive thousands of stars, in all directions, scattered without any apparent order or design; but in one locality, forming a huge ring round the heavens, there is a misty zone called the Milky Way. Let us turn a telescope with a low aperture on this, and what a sight presents itself! Instead of mist, myriads of stars are now seen surrounded by nebulous haze. We put a higher aperture on, and thus pierce further and further into space ”

“ As you know, our sun and its eight spinning planets are not motionless in space. Our sun, with its family of worlds, has for eons been moving through space at the approximate rate of twelve miles a second, across the Milky Way. You know, too, that all other suns, all other stars, are moving through space likewise, some at a lesser speed than ours and some at a speed inconceivably greater. Flaming new suns, dying red suns, cold dark suns, each is flashing through the infinities of space on its own course, each toward its appointed doom. ”

“ A glance at the Milky Way, with its sharply defined irregular boundaries, its clefts and diverging spur, is almost sufficient to assure us that it is a real cluster of stars, and does not merely indicate the directions in which the universe extends farthest. ”

“ Beyond the Milky Way.—Each additional step into the depths of space brings us into a region of which less is known, and what lies beyond the Milky Way is largely a matter of conjecture. We shrink from thinking it an infinite void, endless emptiness, and our intellectual sympathies go out to Lambert's speculation of a universe filled with stellar systems, of which ours, bounded by the galaxy, is only one. ”

“ Hence the Milky Way is the theatre of extreme activity and motion; it is comparatively crowded with matter undergoing continual change, and is therefore not sufficiently stable for long periods to be at all likely to possess habitable worlds. ”

“ He also detected spots on the sun’s disk, the phases of Venus, and irregularities on the moon’s surface, and declared the Milky Way to be composed of a countless tract of separate stars.
When we remember the limited power of the telescope of the age, we can but marvel, not at how little, but how much was known regarding the starry skies. ”

“ However opinions may vary as to the configuration of the star-streams composing this object, no doubt now exists among astronomers that the Milky Way consists really of suns, some doubtless falling short of our own sun in brilliancy, but many probably surpassing it. Around these suns, we may fairly conceive, there revolve systems of dependent orbs, each supporting its myriads of living creatures. We have afforded to us a noble theme for contemplation in the consideration of the endless diversities of structure, and of arrangement, which must prevail throughout this immensity of systems. ”

“ The Galaxy, or Milky Way, surrounds the borders of our island in space like a stellar garland, and when openings appear in it they are, by contrast, far more impressive than the general darkness of the interstellar expanse seen in other directions. ”

“ The Milky Way, as we see it, presents the aspect which has been just accounted for, in its general appearance of a girdle around the heavens and in its bifurcation at a certain point, and Herschel's explanation of this appearance, as just given, has never been seriously questioned. One doubtful point remains: are the stars scattered all through space? ”

“ According to his view, the appearance known as the Milky Way is produced by a collection of irregularly condensed star-clusters, within which the sun is somewhat eccentrically placed. The nebulous ring which thus integrates the light of countless worlds was supposed by him to be made up of stars scattered over a bent or "broken plane," or to lie in two planes slightly inclined to each other, our system occupying a position near their intersection. ”

“ Facts like these lead astronomers to believe that the Milky Way has a definite relation with all the visible universe, that even the most distant nebula is not an outlying universe apart from ours, but all are parts of one vast stellar system. ”

“ He held the Milky Way to be a reflection of the light of stars which are not shone upon by the sun; comets to be a conjunction of planets which emit flames; shooting-stars to be a sort of sparks thrown off by the air. He held that winds arise when the air is rarefied by the sun's heat; that thunder is a clashing together of the clouds, lightning their violent friction; an earthquake a subsidence of air into the earth. ”

“ The Milky Way itself is commonly thought to be a ring, or series of rings, like the coils of the great spiral nebula in Andromeda, and separated from us by a space far greater than the thickness of the ring itself. ”

“ In those days, the earth was supposed to hang like a disk in the great hollow globe of the world, its land divided into two parts by the Mediterranean Sea and its edges washed by the turbulent river of the ocean. The upper part of this globe was illuminated by the sun, moon and stars and was called Heaven, but the lower part extended below the earth-disk and formed a terrifying pit of utter darkness. The Milky Way was a road which led to the home of the gods, but this pit was a place of dire punishment. ”

“ No reversal of polarity could take place between these planets under these circumstances, any more than between the earth and the moon. In some portions of the Milky Way, doubtless, suns blaze by dozens across the sky at night, and by day as well, to which, in our more solitary skies, we are strangers. Revolving in perfect harmony, perturbations must nevertheless be frequent, and to what limits they may there be confined we shall [195] never know until we realize the extent of these galaxies and the relative contiguity of their solar systems to each other. ”

“ Russell writing of this region says: "Here the Milky Way is crossed by a dark streak which immediately suggests a passing cloud. But, year in and year out, on the clearest nights, the dark region is there. Its origin must be interstellar space—perhaps in an actual thinning of the stars of the Galaxy, perhaps in the interposition of some cosmic cloud of overwhelming vast dimensions."
Many think the Galaxy a universe by itself and our sun one of its myriad stars. ”