cosmology, field of study that brings together the natural sciences, particularlyastronomy andphysics, in a joint effort to understand the physicaluniverse as a unified whole. The “observable universe” is the region of space that humans can actually or theoretically observe with the aid of technology. It can be thought of as a bubble with Earth at its centre. It is differentiated from the entirety of the universe, which is the wholecosmic system ofmatter and energy, including the human race. Unlike the observable universe, the  universe is possibly infinite and without spatial edges.

If one looks up on a clear night, one will see that the sky is full ofstars. During the summer months in the Northern Hemisphere, a faint band of light stretches from horizon to horizon, a swath of pale white cutting across a background of deepest black. For the early Egyptians, this was the heavenlyNile, flowing through the land of the dead ruled byOsiris. The ancient Greeks likened it to a river of milk. Astronomers now know that the band is actually composed of countless stars in a flattened disk seen edge on. The stars are so close to one another along the line of sight that the unaided eye has difficulty discerning the individual members. Through a largetelescope, astronomers findmyriads of like systems sprinkled throughout the depths of space. They call such vast collections of starsgalaxies, after the Greek word for milk, and call the local galaxy to which theSun belongs theMilky Way Galaxy or simply the Galaxy.

The Sun is astar around whichEarth and the otherplanets revolve, and by extension every visible star in the sky is a sun in its own right. Some stars are intrinsically brighter than the Sun; others, fainter. Much less light is received from the stars than from the Sun because the stars are all much farther away. Indeed, they appear densely packed in the Milky Way only because there are so many of them. The actual separations of the stars are enormous, so large that it isconventional to measure their distances in units of how far light can travel in a given amount of time. Thespeed of light (in a vacuum) equals 3 × 10¹⁰ cm/sec (centimetres per second); at such a speed, it is possible to circle the Earth seven times in a single second. Thus in terrestrial terms the Sun, which lies 500 light-seconds from the Earth, is very far away; however, even the next closest star,Proxima Centauri, at a distance of 4.3light-years (4.1 × 10¹⁸ cm), is 270,000 times farther yet. The stars that lie on the opposite side of the Milky Way from the Sun have distances that are on the order of 100,000 light-years, which is the typicaldiameter of a largespiral galaxy.

If the kingdom of the stars seems vast, the realm of the galaxies is larger still. The nearest galaxies to the Milky Way system are the Large and SmallMagellanic Clouds, two irregular satellites of the Galaxy visible to the naked eye in the Southern Hemisphere. The Magellanic Clouds are relatively small (containing roughly 10⁹ stars) compared to the Galaxy (with some 10¹¹ stars), and they lie at a distance of about 200,000 light-years. The nearest large galaxy comparable to the Galaxy is theAndromeda Galaxy (also called M31 because it was the 31st entry in acatalog of astronomical objectscompiled by the French astronomerCharles Messier in 1781), and it lies at a distance of about 2,000,000 light-years. The Magellanic Clouds, the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Milky Way system all are part of an aggregation of two dozen or so neighbouring galaxies known as theLocal Group. The Galaxy and M31 are the largest members of this group.

The Galaxy and M31 are both spiral galaxies, and they are among the brighter and more massive of all spiral galaxies. The most luminous and brightest galaxies, however, are not spirals but rather supergiant ellipticals (also called cD galaxies by astronomers for historical reasons that are not particularly illuminating).Elliptical galaxies have roundish shapes rather than the flattened distributions thatcharacterize spiral galaxies, and they tend to occur in rich clusters (those containing thousands of members) rather than in the loose groups favoured by spirals. The brightest member galaxies of rich clusters have been detected at distances exceeding several thousand million light-years from the Earth. The branch of learning that deals with phenomena at the scale of many millions of light-years is called cosmology—a term derived from combining two Greek words,kosmos, meaning “order,” “harmony,” and “the world,” andlogos, signifying “word” or “discourse.” Cosmology is, in effect, the study of theuniverse at large.

Britannica Quiz

Stars: Explosions in Space