EVERYDAY SCIENCE

Detailed explanation-1: -They come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The Milky Way is a large barred spiral galaxy. All the stars we see in the night sky are in our own Milky Way Galaxy.

Detailed explanation-2: -Why is the Milky Way a spiral? This is due to its rotation, or rather, the rotation of matter inside the galactic disk around the center.

Detailed explanation-3: -The smallest of galaxies contain a “mere” few hundred million stars while the largest galaxies contain up to one hundred trillion stars! Scientists have been able to segment galaxies into 4 main types: spiral, elliptical, peculiar, and irregular.

Detailed explanation-4: -Spiral galaxies They are divided into two parallel classes: normal spirals and barred spirals. The normal spirals have arms that emanate from the nucleus, while barred spirals have a bright linear feature called a bar that straddles the nucleus, with the arms unwinding from the ends of the bar.

Detailed explanation-5: -About half of spiral galaxies are barred; examples include M58 (SBc), M61 (SABbc), the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC, Sm), … and our own Milky Way galaxy! The bars are mostly stars (usually), unlike spiral arms (which have lots of gas and dust besides stars).