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DW (English)
  • 11/27/2024
The name for our galaxy comes from the ancient Greek words for ‘milk’ or ‘milky’. They could only see it as a bright band of light in the night sky. This Tomorrow Today viewer question comes from Daniele M. in Bulgaria.

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00:00Why is our home galaxy called the Milky Way?
00:09The roots of the name can be found in the word galaxias, which comes from ancient Greek.
00:14It's derived from the terms gala and galaktos, which mean milk or milky.
00:21In those days of little light pollution, our home galaxy was visible everywhere as a bright band in the night sky.
00:30There were no telescopes. The ancient Greeks explained the origin of this milky road with a story.
00:39According to myth, the milk poured into the sky from the breast of the goddess Hera
00:44when she pushed one of her husband's illegitimate sons away as he sought to suckle.
00:51Over 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Democritus came up with another explanation.
00:57The world is made up of tiny particles, he said,
01:00so the band of light in the sky must also consist of particles, which we call stars.
01:07Hundreds of years would pass before people could actually see individual stars in the Milky Way.
01:14Then, in the early 17th century, Dutch spectacle maker Hans Lippehey made a groundbreaking discovery.
01:22That distant objects appear larger when viewed through two ground lenses,
01:28laying the groundwork for the invention of the telescope.
01:33Galileo Galilei developed the instrument further and was the first to use it to observe the night sky.
01:41There he saw that the Milky Way really is made up of countless stars.
01:51Since the dawn of the 20th century, astronomers have been looking deeper and deeper into the universe.
01:59Bright dots that their predecessors saw in earlier ages turned out to be distant galaxies.
02:07Our cosmic home is just one of around a trillion aggregations of stars
02:12that are thought to populate the visible universe.
02:15But it's the only one called the Milky Way, a mythical name from the ancient world.

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