Galaxy Device Features
The word "galaxy" is translated from Greek as "milk ring". This is how ancient scientists saw the phenomenon in the form of a glow in the night sky. Looking at the sky with the naked eye, they assumed that nebulae were glowing on it. When it was suggested that these were huge clusters of stars, they began to be called star islands or island universes. After finding out the fact that spiral celestial objects are similar to our galactic system, they all began to be called galaxies, and other terms are used extremely rarely.
The ancient Greeks were engaged in the study of space objects. It all started with the Milky Way, which stands out so clearly against the background of the night sky that it could be seen with the naked eye. At first, people could not explain this beautiful phenomenon from the point of view of science, they did not yet know what the galaxy looks like. Then the ancient Greeks, as masters of creating beautiful myths, came up with a fairy tale about the Milky Way. And, of course, they connected it with the name of Hercules. Allegedly, Zeus, in order to reward his son from an earthly woman with divine power, brought him to his sleeping wife Hera to give him the breast milk of the goddess. But she woke up and pushed the child away. Part of the milk spilled across the sky in the form of a white stripe, which turned into a starry road.
Many peoples of the Milky Way have their own equally beautiful names. The Japanese call it the Silver River, the Indians the Great Serpent, the Slavs the Road of the Gods.
Gradually, scientists became interested in the stellar object. Even the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus pondered what the Milky Way consists of, and suggested that it is a cluster of dim stars. But he could not prove this due to the lack of technical optical instruments at that time, and his correct assumption remained a hypothesis until Galileo confirmed it in 1610 by examining the Milky Way through a telescope. Even later, I. Kant suggested that this is a huge disk-shaped system. In the 18th century, W. Herschel examined a large number of different space objects with the help of a powerful telescope. He also suggested that humanity lives in one of them. Herschel introduced the concept of a light year and proposed it as a unit of measurement of distances in outer space.
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