Milky Way Galaxy Edge On View

The Milky Way[a] is the galaxy that contains our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy’s appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. The term Milky Way is a translation of the Latin via lactea, from the Greek γαλαξίας κύκλος (galaxías kýklos, “milky circle”). From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a band because its disk-shaped structure is viewed from its outer rim. 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.


Water in its life-sustaining liquid phase exists beyond our own planet, both in our Solar System--and elsewhere. With oceans of water sloshing around on 71% of our own planet's surface, Earth still remains the only planet known to have stable bodies of liquid water. Liquid water is essential for all known life forms on Earth. The existence of water on the surface of Earth is the outcome of its atmospheric pressure and a stable orbit in our Sun;s circumstellar habitable zone. The habitable zone is that Goldilocks region, surrounding a star, where the temperature is not too hot, not too cold, but just right for life sustaining water to exist in its liquid phase. However, the origin of Earth's water still remains unknown. The team of scientists used data gathered by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, composed of a duo of twin spacecraft that circled Earth's Moon throughout 2012, each measuring the push and pull of the other as an indicator of lunar gravity. Titan: Titan, the tormented, hydrocarbon-slashed largest moon of Saturn--and the second largest moon in our Solar System, after Ganymede--could possess a subsurface, salty ocean that may well be as salty as the Dead Sea on Earth. The salty water could begin approximately 31 to 62 miles beneath Titan's icy shell, according to recent estimates. Meanwhile, on Titan's smog enshrouded surface, "life as we do not know it" could swim in alien lakes and rivers that flow with liquid methane and ethane hydrocarbons--instead of water.