Today’s topic in the ‘Celestial Wonders’ program was ‘Discovering the Milky Way’. Here is a quick look at few of the discussions we had.

How can we see the milky way if we are inside it? Isn’t it like trying to take a picture of the outside of your house while being IN your house? Because we are inside the Milky Way, we don’t get to take any pictures of it from an angle above it, but we only get pictures in which we see the structure of the Milky Way edge-on, from inside of it.

Exactly how far is an object when we say that an object is light years away? What do we understand when we look at objects that are light years away through a telescope? It was interesting to learn that the distance to Proxima Centauri is only four light years. However, it takes the light from our stellar next door neighbor four years to get to Earth.

We talked about dwarf galaxies, which are small galaxies composed of about 100 million up to several billion stars, a small number compared to the Milky Way’s 200–400 billion stars. Our milky way is expected to now grow mainly by eating smaller galaxies, rather than by collecting gas.

It was quite interesting to find out how the radiation from the sun reaches the earth. The magnetic field around earth protects our body’s DNA from being affected by this radiation. A very small change in our DNA can even affect the way we look.

Children were also curious to know how the planets, moons and asteroids in the Solar System were formed. After debating over some interesting theories and watching informative videos, we came to the end of the session.