The Milky Way R银河系. G. Drage.pptxVIP

Astronomers measure large distances in light years. 1 light year is the distance that light can travel in a single year, and it’s an enormous number. The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters/second. That’s the same as 186,282 miles per second. And a year has 31,556,926 seconds. 5,880,000,000,000 miles or 5.88 trillion miles. The Milky Way The Greek philosopher Democritus (450–370 BC) proposed that the bright band on the night sky known as the Milky Way might consist of distant stars. Aristotle (384–322 BC), however, believed the Milky Way to be caused by the ignition of the fiery exhalation of some stars which were large, numerous and close together and that the ignition takes place in the upper part of the atmosphere, in the region of the world which is continuous with the heavenly motions.“ The Neoplatonist philosopher Olympiodorus the Younger (c. 495–570 AD) criticized this view, arguing that if the Milky Way were sublunary it should appear different at different times and places on the Earth, and that it should have parallax, which it does not. In his view, the Milky Way was celestial. This idea would be influential later in the Islamic world. According to Mohaini Mohamed, the Arabian astronomer, Alhazen (965–1037), made the first attempt at observing and measuring the Milky Ways parallax, and he thus determined that because the Milky Way had no parallax, it was very remote from the Earth and did not belong to the atmosphere.“ An Persian astronomer proposed the Milky Way galaxy to be a collection of countless fragments of the nature of nebulous stars.“ An Andalusian astronomer proposed that the Milky Way was made up of many stars that almost touch one another and appear to be a continuous image due to the effect of refraction from sublunary material, citing his observation of the conjunction of Jupiter and Mars as evidence of this occurring when two objects are near. In the 14th century, a Syrian-born scientist proposed the Milky Way galaxy to be a myriad