• Question: What is a galaxy?

    Asked by Bradley to Christie, Dan, David, Dawn, Sian on 20 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Christie Waddington

      Christie Waddington answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      A galaxy is a system of millions or billions of stars, gas and dust that are held together by gravity. Earth is in the solar system along with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus and the Sun. The solar system itself is in the Milky Way galaxy, which is about 100,000 light years wide and 1,000 light years thick (there’s a great Monty Python song about this from the film “The Meaning of Life”!)

    • Photo: David Robertson

      David Robertson answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      I love Christie’s answer.

      The only thing I would add is that we now think that all galaxies have a huge black hole in their centre, this is a black hole about a million times heavier than our sun. Unfortunately Monty Python didn’t know about this when they wrote their song!

    • Photo: Sian Thomas

      Sian Thomas answered on 22 Jun 2016:

      A scrummy bar of chocolate – my favorite!

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