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Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Our universe in a glimpse

Cosmic Landscape

For your information, we can classify our universe into sevral components. You can see the picture above to get a clearer information. So, we will start from the basics.


Planet Earth

Solar System

The collection of the nine planets as a group including Earth, is considered as a solar system. Our solar system currently have 9 planets. But I believe it is still possible to find more planets in our solar system. Not to mention, our probes haven't reach Pluto yet. So, there are possiblities that there are other planets after Pluto.


Andromeda Galaxy

Then, a collection of solar system made up a galaxy. Our galaxy is known as the Milky Way. I hope you guys don't get confused so far. A lot of people (including myself) always have the galaxy and solar system concept mixed up. Well, to make it easier to understand we can say that a galaxy is combinations of solar systems and a solar system is a combination of planets.


Seyferts Sextet

The third component is the group. The name of our group is the Local Group. It is made of a group of galaxies including Milky Way. You might be wondering how these galaxies can form this local group? Well, the answer is gravity. Imagine there is a strong gravitational pull which is stronger than those found in the centre of the galaxy. This gravitational pull will then attract nearby galaxies to form the local group.

Then, when these groups are combined together, we called them supercluster. The name where of the supercluster where Milky Way is located is known as Local Supercluster. Superclusters are not the largest components in the universe. They are actually a sub component to super clusters complexes. The existence of these superclusters tells us that galaxies in the universe are not uniformly distributed.

Sources:
Planet
Solar System
Galaxy
Local Group
Supercluster

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