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Name: Milky Way @
Watson's Way
The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System.
Its name "milky" is derived from its appearance as a dim
glowing band arching across the night sky whose individual stars cannot
be distinguished by the naked eye. From Earth the Milky Way
appears as a band because its disk-shaped structure is viewed from
within. Galileo Galilei first resolved the band of light
into individual stars with his telescope in 1610. Until the early 1920s
most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in
the Universe. Following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers
Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, observations by Edwin Hubble showed
that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies now known to number in
the billions.
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