galaxy

«galaxy» in Mova's school dictionary: a huge group of billions of stars, gas and dust held… — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 5 sentences of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

noun (a galaxy, galaxies; the Galaxy = the Milky Way)

meaning for a pupil

1) A galaxy is a huge group of billions of stars, gas and dust held together by gravity. tree →

2) Our galaxy is called the Milky Way; the Sun is one of its stars. tree →

3) Informally, «a galaxy of» means a large group of famous or bright people or things. tree →

sense in the lessons

In science lessons we learn that the Earth orbits the Sun, the Sun is a star in the Milky Way galaxy, and the universe holds billions of galaxies. Galaxies can be spiral, elliptical or irregular. On a dark night away from city lights you can see the Milky Way as a pale band across the sky. Phrases: «spiral galaxy», «our galaxy», «the Milky Way galaxy», «a galaxy far, far away».

examples

• The Sun is one star in the Milky Way galaxy. tree →
• There are billions of galaxies in the universe. tree →
• The Andromeda Galaxy is our nearest big neighbour. tree →
• A spiral galaxy looks like a whirlpool of stars. tree →
• Light from distant galaxies takes millions of years to reach us. tree →
• On a dark night we saw our galaxy as a misty band. tree →
• The film was set in a faraway galaxy. tree →
• The show had a galaxy of stars. tree →

note

Plural: galaxies (y → ies). Galaxy ≠ solar system: a solar system is one star with its planets; a galaxy has billions of stars. Universe is everything, including all galaxies. Numbers in astronomy are enormous: the Milky Way has about 100–400 billion stars.

In the corpora

• The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy, with a bar of stars across its centre and spiral arms curling out from it.
• The Sun lies about 26,000 light years from the galaxy's centre, in a smaller arm called the Orion Spur.
• The Sun takes about 230 million years to go once round the centre of the galaxy, a "galactic year".
• The word galaxy comes from the Greek word for milk, and the Milky Way was named for its pale milky look.
• The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are two small galaxies near ours, seen as misty patches in the southern sky.

Trees and pragmatics

Every meaning and example of «galaxy» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.