The Milky Way Lesson 23 of the space course of Mova's primary school: 14 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
0 The Sun is not alone: it is one of a few hundred billion stars in a giant spinning disc called the Milky Way, our galaxy. 1 We live inside the disc, so when we look along it we see a pale band of countless stars stretching across a dark sky. 3 We sit far out in a small arm, about 26,000 light years from the busy centre, where a giant black hole hides. 4 Out camping on a dark night, with no street lights, you can see this milky river; in most towns light pollution has washed it away. 5 The Milky Way is our galaxy, a huge disc of a few hundred billion stars, and the Sun is just one of them. 6 The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy, with a bar of stars across its centre and spiral arms curling out from it. 7 The disc of the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across but only about 1,000 light years thick in most places. 8 The Sun lies about 26,000 light years from the galaxy's centre, in a smaller arm called the Orion Spur. 9 The Sun takes about 230 million years to go once round the centre of the galaxy, a "galactic year". 10 At the galaxy's centre is a black hole, a place where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape, called Sagittarius A*, about 4 million times the mass of the Sun, first imaged in 2022. 11 The word galaxy comes from the Greek word for milk, and the Milky Way was named for its pale milky look. 12 In 1610 Galileo turned a small telescope on the Milky Way and found it was made of countless faint stars. 13 Most people in Britain, the USA and Europe can no longer see the Milky Way from home because of light pollution, the glow of street lights and buildings in the night sky. 14 The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are two small galaxies near ours, seen as misty patches in the southern sky. ← previous Distances and light yearsnext → Galaxies and the Big Bang↑ back to Space This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/23-the-milky-way/