Field Trip: Milky Way

JACKIE FAHERTY (Senior Scientist, Department of Astrophysics): Welcome everybody to another field trip. Sorry about that. I hadn’t muted myself, so you might have heard me twice. Welcome, welcome, welcome to our- what we’re now calling our YouTube spaceship.

 And we are going to take you on a very exciting ride today, on a field trip to the Milky Way, through the Milky Way, through really exciting data sets in the Milky Way.

My name is Jackie Faherty, and I’m an astrophysicist at the Museum, at the American Museum of Natural History. And I’m also in the Education Department, so I do a lot of these public talks. And I am joined today by a very wonderful pilot, a grad student at Columbia University, as well as the Museum—Marina Gemma.

Marina, can you show us your face, that you are real?

MARINA GEMMA (Graduate Student, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences): I am real. I am here. Hi, Jackie, and hi everybody. I’m excited to take you guys through the Milky Way today. It’ll be fun.

FAHERTY: This is your first time flying through the Milky Way live with an audience, right, Marina?

GEMMA: It is. So, yeah. Cross our fingers.

FAHERTY: Cross our fingers that we don’t have any- any problems, but I’m sure that we won’t. Because this is virtual and we can correct all mistakes. In the chat today we also have two amazing female scientists. And I can say that because they work with me–Johanna Vos and Daniella Bardalez Gagliuffi will be in the chat, answering your questions.

I can see already we’ve got a lot going on in the chat. We’ve got a lot of people saying hello. I will be multi-tasking during this, monitoring the chat to see where- what questions you guys have. I’m going to throw some questions out at you guys.

I can already see we’ve got people from Florida, Oct- Octavio. We’ve got people from Greece, from the Philippines. Thank you all for tuning in. I see Mary Ashtub from New Jersey. Hello, New Jersey. I hope you survived the storm.

Anybody from New York that’s out there that wants to tell us about the blackout, feel free to also put some info about where you are in here. But most importantly, put in the chat any questions you have as we fly.

So, let’s get started on this field trip. Are we ready, Marina? I think we’re ready.

GEMMA: We are.

FAHERTY: Great. So, we’re taking off. We are going to be using for this field trip the same software that we’ve been using in all of our YouTube spaceship field trips, which is called OpenSpace software. It’s NASA funded. It’s all open source. So, you can download this software yourself and play with the data that you’re seeing here.

We’re flying away from the Earth on our YouTube spaceship. Marina has started focused over New York City, hovering over Central Park with the American Museum of Natural History at center stage there.

So, we are now leaving the- leaving the city, leaving the Earth. And we’re going to be hovering around the Earth with the perspective that I’m pretty sure many of us- many of us, maybe in this chat right now, might really want to have right now, which is a viewpoint from space, where we could be looking down onto the Earth and around at the stars.

So, we’re moving away from the planet. And you can see the northeast suburbs, the whole shore of the Northeast just came alive, the oceans are there. We’re seeing the structure of North America come to life. And then the atmosphere comes on. And in OpenSpace, that’s actually a real rendering of the atmosphere as it was four hours ago.

What day do we have it set at right now, Marina, this picture of the Earth?

GEMMA: Thursday, so yesterday. This is yesterday’s atmosphere. 

FAHERTY: So, it’s after the big storm that hit many of us. Okay. So, here’s Field Trip Milky Way. Marina’s got us moved around so that you’re actually seeing that beautiful stream, river of stars, as we call it, coming across your sky.

Now, this is a view of the sky that- You guys can say in the chat if you’ve ever seen a dark sky. Where you’re getting crisp, clear views of the stars. Crisp, clear views of a very small number of stars, actually, that your eye can actually see. So, your eye can actually only see about 2500 stars or so, if you’re in the darkest, darkest place that you can get to.

But even still, it’s a pretty dramatic view. So, Marina’s kind of moving us around here so you can get a viewpoint. And I see people putting in from different parts of the world. Right now we’ve moved into a viewpoint where the Sun is coming into view, but as a reminder, the Northern sky looks a little bit different than the Southern sky. Well, actually, it looks totally different than the Southern sky.

Your- your constellations will be different. Because you’re seeing different parts of the nighttime sky. And now, what’s important and what we can take you on in this YouTube spaceship is we can take you away- away from the stars and see exactly how they’re oriented.

So, the first step in Field Trip: Milky Way is that the stars are what make up the galaxy. And it’s a lot of what we’re going to be talking about. Marina just turned on constellation lines. And this is showing you the shapes that you might see that are the classic shapes. Among the 88 classic shapes that we have decided, astronomers have decided, are the official boundaries of the sky.

Marina’s got us focused on this one in blue, here, which I’m going to come back to a couple of times, is Orion. So, in the chat, if you guys want to respond if you’ve ever seen Orion, even New Yorkers—because I can see we’ve got a lot of New Yorkers here—if you’ve seen Orion. Have you been watching Betelgeuse? Betelgeuse has been- is the red star at the armpit of Orion, here, that has been dimming, that was dimming in the winter.

And now, what we can do is we can actually move away to show you that the perspective changes if you’re further away from Earth or closer to what those constellations look like. So, Marina’s going to zoom us away. Pretty far away. Until you start to see the figures of these constellations come off the wallpaper, as we say.

And notice the stars that made up those constellations are very different distances from each other. So, what we’ve just done for you is on our YouTube spaceship, taken you into three dimensions. And we’re kind of flying you among the stars right now. So, let’s- We’re giving you a little bit of a view here.

The blue- The reason why- I can see some questions here about the blue versus the red lines. The red lines mark the zodiac constellations. The blue lines are just prominent constellations—so, Orion is one, and Ursa Major, or the Big Dipper, is another.

And let’s head back in, Marina. Let’s get back to our regular perspective. And so- so, we’re going to bring the constellations back together. Notice how many stars you’ve been looking at. We had just a question a moment ago about how many light seconds or years have we traveled so far. So, as we come back in, I’m going to give you a distance scale to think about here.

And from this perspective right now, Marina, how far away are we?

GEMMA: We’re about 14,000 AU right now. So, 2.6 light months, about.

FAHERTY: Two-point-six light months. So, 14,000- we call AU—Astronomical Unit. That’s actually the distance between the Earth and the Sun. That’s such a big number that astronomers instead use light travel, in order to talk about distances. So, that was 2.6 light months.

For scale, it takes light leaving the Sun about eight minutes to reach the Earth. And now, the perspective that we’re at here is about 2.5 months in light time away from the Sun. And there’s a reason why I’ve picked this distance away for our next big move of the Milky Way.

So, I’ve- I’ve said that these are the stars, these are the bright stars, the stars that you can see, basically, with your eye. We’ve created a nighttime sky for you. What we’re going to do now is start exposing you to all the stars in the Milky Way that you can’t see, but they’re there.

So, Marina, why don’t we brighten up this new data set that is called the European Space Agency’s GAIA Catalog. If any of you follow me on Twitter, you know I talk about this catalog at all times because it’s super amazing. And I should have given you a pause there to appreciate that. I’d love to hear your reactions in the chat to this.

What do you think of this? These are all stars in the Milky Way that we have mapped that you cannot detect. And this is roughly, as we’re orbiting here at about 2.5 light months away from the Earth, you’re looking at roughly 7 million or so of them.

This full catalog has two billion stars in it. If we brighten all of those up for you, though, it would just be a big, bright mess on your screen right now. It is a very, very exciting, exciting, exciting data set.

I’m seeing a lot of OMGs in the chat and I am OMGing with you from here. Even though I’ve seen this many, many times.

And now I’m going to OMG you again. Because the other important thing that you have to know about stars in the Milky Way is that they all move. And here’s a key—they all move at a rate that you’re never going to see, unfortunately. Because it happens over a time scale that we don’t live long enough to see.

But with this software, we can actually speed time up to show you motions of stars in the Milky Way. And so, we’ve- Marina has turned this on. Marina, how fast are we moving right now?

GEMMA: We’re moving at about 50,000 years per second right now.

FAHERTY: Fifty thousand years every second. So, that’s- what you’re seeing is something that your eye cannot detect. But that our Milky Way galaxy- We’re not static at all. Stars are in constant motion, constant motion here.

And why we’re hanging out at this distance of 14,000 AU or 2.5 light months away is the following- And I’ll throw this into the chat. What do you know of as the closest star to us? And I know that everybody might say the Sun, and so I mean other than the Sun. What is the closest star to our Sun? Answer it in the chat.

And here’s- here’s what I will tell you, after you tell me what it is—in one million years, that is going to change. That is going to change pretty drastically. And I’m seeing some people answering. Pratheeksha Shetty you’ve answered Proxima Centauri correctly. I’m seeing others saying Alpha Centauri. It is that system. That is the closest star to us at four light years away. Four light years away.

But we’re at 2.6 light months away. So, ladies and gentlemen on this YouTube spaceship with me, in a million years there will be a star at 2.5 light months away. As opposed to Proxima Centauri, which is four light years away. How do we know that? We’re basically showing you.

Because we can measure the motions of the stars here. We know where they are. We can move time forward and we can see that in a million years, the Earth and the Sun, our little solar system, will come in a passing in the night kind of moment, with this other star. It’s called Gliese 710.

It’s much lower mass than our own Sun, but it might be carrying its own solar system with it. We certainly are. And so, think of that, that’s really exciting. If you want something to give you hope today or excitement to look forward to in a future that, I know, none of us will live- live towards because it’s in a million years, but still. It’s really, really exciting.

So, that’s why we’ve been hanging out here at this distance and watching these stars fly by. And now, let’s- let’s actually think about more of this, now that we can see the stars moving. The next step is- Okay, let’s talk more about these stars in the Milky Way.

I just mentioned this star Gliese 710 is coming through, but what about not just single stars? What about all the stars in the Milky Way that have more than one? Does this happen? Our Sun has our solar system, but it doesn’t have a partner. It doesn’t have another star that it’s moving with. But many stars do.

So, now we’re going to switch- Now, Marina, we can turn this one down- this data- this data set. And I say the word “data.” These are points that we have acquired through using telescopes. In particular, all of these points that you’re seeing have been carefully measured by a telescope in space.

And for those of us- those that are just joining us right now, we’re about halfway through this program and we are in the middle of a description of stars in the galaxy. My name’s Jackie Faherty. I’m an astronomer at the Museum. Marina Gemma is flying for us with OpenSpace, and we’ve got astrophysicists Johanna Vos and Daniella Bardalez Gagliuffi in the chat taking your questions.

And so, here we are flying around some stars. Let’s turn on a special set of stars that is a complete list of roughly 250,000 stars that you’re looking at that all move with somebody else. And when I say somebody else, I mean another star. They’re pairs.

So, I like thinking of the Milky Way not just as any one thing, but as a collection of different families of stars. And here’s one of your views that you’ll get to see now.

Let’s turn on time a little bit more. And as I do, I want to answer Katie’s question about how did we figure out the motion of these stars. Because I can answer that so carefully because that’s actually what I do, in part, as an astronomer—you take very, very careful images of the stars over a set amount of time. And astronomers have been looking at the sky for long enough that we see very small motion of a star in the sky.

Not something that your eye would pick out, but something that a camera would. And we take pictures, and we look at how those images, the positions of the stars change over time. And then we move- we extrapolate forward so that we can see where those motions are going. So, once you’ve got images taken over a certain amount of time, you can see the direction and the speed that a star is going.

So, Marina has turned time on. Marina, how fast is time moving now?

GEMMA: We’ve sped up to about 500,000 years per second.

FAHERTY: So, 500,000 years a second is going by. We’re still out here at 2.5 light months away because this is a nice perspective, also, to be viewing the stars of the Milky Way. And have a look at this. Have a look at this—every single one of the stars that you’re seeing here moves with at least one other star in here.

And so, you can really see that. Notice also- I want you to be the scientist observer, like I am when I look at data sets like this. Some of them are close to each other. Some of them are farther away from each other. Some of them appear to be moving very fast and some of them slower. Astronomers look to all of those “observables,” as we call them, to figure out what is going on in the galaxy, what kinds of stories do these families tell us.

Have they interacted with other stars? Have they- Are they breaking apart? Have they just recently been captured? Or did they evolve together? These are the stories of these families. And I’m seeing another question from Michelle Stephens—is it possible that our Sun has been paired with another star in the past?

Michelle, I absolutely love that question. It is an excellent one. There is a theory about our own Sun—it’s called the Nemesis Theory—that we do have a low-mass pair of- a partner. But- And astronomers have looked for it. But we’ve never been able to find it. So, at this point, we don’t think the Sun was- has been paired closely.

Now, it could have been born, though, and that leads me nicely into the next set of stars I want to show you. It could have been born with a giant family of stars. So, this- this data that you’re- these stars that you’re looking at are just pairs. Marina, let’s show the full families that are in here.

And I’m- Another excellent question from Michael Reina—why do the stars seem to move in different directions?

You’re basically seeing just sort of bulk motion of stars through the galaxy when we show you that with time turned on at, as Marina said, 50,000 years a second. And when you do that, you’re catching a lot of different motions that might be going on. The bulk of it is in one direction, but sometimes stars get kicked around by an interaction with something, an interaction with a big cloud of gas or dust, or an interaction with another star.

So, you’re seeing the legitimate, like, walking around the galaxy. Where’s everybody going? Think of it as, like, being on the sidewalks of New York City in, like, Times Square. There’s a bulk motion of where people are going, but then there’s others kind of going in other directions. And that’s kind of like what the stars do.

Now, Marina has us set up here where we’re looking at only young stars. And so, we think this is actually how stars form in big families in the galaxy. And they are together in a big group. So, very likely, going back to Michelle’s question, our Sun did form with a whole big family when it was born. But our Sun is 4.5 billion years old.

It’s like middle aged. But it’s lost its family at this point. It’s- it’s- it’s careened away and it’s doing its own thing with us, the solar system, its own little family. But here, we’re moving around at this distance of 2.5 light months.

We’re moving around the families, the young families. This is maybe what our- where our Sun came from, from a little grouping like this. And, Marina, let’s turn the constellation lines on, so we can get some orientation as to where we are.

So, we’ve got- You can see the Milky Way is stretched above us. And right in front of us here, right in front of us is a- actually I’m not totally sure that this is what I think I’m looking at. But I think we’ve got the Scorpion. Actually, I think we’ve got Cepheus right in front of us—a great constellation.

Marina’s going to move us around so that we can get one of the most famous constellations that I pointed out earlier, Orion, in- in the field of view here. Oh, I see a question that I’d love to answer here by Arabella, about why do stars travel in pairs.

And so, we’re not totally sure, but the answer to that does also rely on this picture that we’re beginning with, which is they start as giant families, big groups. And then what probably happens is they start breaking up. The big families break apart.

So, Marina’s left the constellation lines on as we move out to this three-dimensional view of the young factory of stars in our galaxy. Moving away at- you can tell us how far away we’ve reached, Marina. That would be good for people to know how far away we are.

GEMMA: We’re at about a kiloparsec right now from Earth.

FAHERTY: A kiloparsec is about three- So, one- The word “parsec” you can multiply by three to get it in light years. So, we’re at about 3,000 light years away from- away from the Earth. Actually, sorry, it’s the other way around. I just did that in reverse. It’s divided by three.

So, we’re about 300 light years away from the Earth right now. And- So, from this perspective- The reason why we have the constellation lines on, is because at the very center was your perspective at Earth. And the blue lines that you see- Remember, that was the constellation Orion. And so, those show you where Orion is in here.

So, let’s turn these constellation lines off. And- and when you turn it off, focus on Orion there—the youngest star. I mean, sorry- the young- a very young system of stars that’s near us. Every one of the stars that you’re seeing here—and I’m seeing some questions about why- why there are so many stars in here, why there are so few stars in here.

This is a very, very, very important set of stars. And I’ve only turned ones on here that we think are less than maybe 200-300 million years old. Now, that might sound old to some of you. I see a 5-year-old in here, and so- in the chat. So, maybe that sounds kind of old to you, but it’s actually not.

These are the youngest stars in our galaxy. And they’re very close to the Sun. So, what you’re seeing at the center of this ball, which is just a round ball, like a- I’ve taken a sphere and I’ve put it around the Sun and I’ve said, “Tell me where all the youngest stars are.” And so, at the center there would be the Sun. And then these clumps that you’re seeing are the young stars. And these are the star-forming factories.

This is where all the baby planets are near us. This is where the baby- all of- all of the things we want to know, any question you have about what it was like in our solar system back in the day when it was a couple million years old, this is what it would look like.

And what’s amazing- We’ve stopped here with this face-on view. You’re looking at this three-dimensional structure. And just to give you a little bit of a YouTube spaceship pro- special thing, very few people have ever seen it like this. Because we’ve built this into the OpenSpace software, even the researchers who have been studying the stars haven’t quite seen it this way. It’s something special that we can do at the Hayden Planetarium.

And what we can also do is see where these stars are going. So, Marina, why don’t we turn time on and how fast are we moving time now, Marina?

GEMMA: Now, we’re at about 300 million years per second. So, much, much faster.

FAHERTY: Much, much, much faster. And so, you might ask, “Why, Marina and Jackie, have you had to make time move that fast?” And this is also, to answer a couple of your questions about the speeds- Young stars don’t move all that fast. So, we’ve had to speed time up, because they’ve just formed.

And it actually takes time with stars moving through the galaxy for them to speed up. And so, what you’re looking at is us fast-forwarding time to watch what will happen to some of these stars, these groups, these collections. And what I think is amazing when you see this is-

And I’m seeing questions, like James is asking about the bow shape that you see. The bow shape, I’m pretty sure you’re referring to, is what I would call the hook, which is actually the Upper Scorpius association of young stars that kind of like rips apart as you move time forward.

And notice, there’s a clump that stands still in this. That is Orion. And it looks like Orion is coming to a bit of a halt. It’s not moving much. It’s also moving with the Sun, as well. We have the same direction. And so, we don’t see a lot of the motion of Orion here.

And so, that- this is a very impressive way of looking at and thinking about how stars move and change over time. And these structures are where astronomers look. Because I- I have so many questions when I look at this. Where are the stars going? What happens as they dissolve? What happened to our own Sun? Was it a part of a big family that just broke up like this? Do these things interact? Because they’re very dense. 

And this is just the youngest stars. So, like I said, just a couple hundred million years old. And I’m seeing Ernest- Ernest is saying that one bunch of stars is not moving too much in the middle. Yes, Ernest, that’s Orion. Orion is not moving much. It’s an intriguing thing because it is one of the most well-studied star-forming regions that we know of in the Milky Way.

And this isn’t it, either. This is just a couple hundred light years away from Earth. Let’s show you even more structure. So, Marina, why don’t we pause, go back to now, and turn on an even larger data set, which is very unique to this YouTube Field Trip because we have very few people that have actually seen this.

Let’s move around this. So, the black area at the center is where the Sun is. So, that’s the center. You don’t have that many young stars near the Sun, so that’s why it’s very dark around there. But what you’re seeing, now that we’ve moved farther away- And, Marina, how far away are we now?

GEMMA: We’re at about 1.5 kiloparsecs, approaching 2 kiloparsecs.

FAHERTY: Two kiloparsecs. So, remember one parsec means- divide that by three to get it in light years. So, you’re now at- Now I can’t even remember what I just said. But let’s just say we’re at 1000 light years away, something like that. And at this distance, now everything you’re seeing is structure in the nearby area of the Milky Way.

Where you see these strings of stars, these are other family members that are older. So, when we were close in and we were looking at the young stars, we know that they’re young. I said only young stars in that sample. But this larger structure that we’ve gone another thousand or so light years away, what you see here is even more families of stars. So, you can- Next time you think of the galaxy, it’s not just individual stars, it’s all of these giant structures together. All of these giant structures that are together, that are moving.

And let’s move a little bit further back. Actually, Marina, one thing that I’d love to do is also show how these stars move. So, if we get back to our face-on view- Why don’t we turn time on again? So that we can drive this point home—that the young stars we showed how they moved together. We can leave this at, once again, let’s put it at-

This is- Can you remind us of the speed we put it at, Marina?

GEMMA: 300 million years per second.

FAHERTY: 300 million years per second. Okay. And we’re going back. So, now- now you’re seeing these structures moving through the galaxy like giant—I don’t know what to call it—like, I want to say sloths moving. So, the younger stars take longer to break apart. 

Okay, let’s go back to now. And you might be wondering how far away are we from this- from- from the- in terms of the Milky Way, general. How far away are we? So, if we pause here, and we’re going to pull away, let’s see what you guys think as to how far, how distant we are. 

That was a lot of science we just covered. A huge amount of science that we just covered. Young stars, co-moving stars. But have a look at this. As we pull away, that is- this is a view that we have definitely never had, because we’ve never flown this far away from the galaxy. And at this distance away, where we’re getting a bird’s eye view, you’re seeing the structure of the Milky Way through a rendering.

We’ve rendered what we think the Milky Way looks like here. It has spiral arms. It’s got a very, very bright center, where there’s a lot of stars. And the stars that we’ve been talking about in the galaxy, that we’ve learned so much of, they take up just a small fraction of the overall size. Now, we think there are 100, 200, maybe 300 billion stars in the Milky Way.

I was so excited to talk about that data set, which I called GAIA. And that has mapped 2 billion stars, or roughly 2 billion stars. That’s a small percentage of the number of stars in the galaxy. But it is so important to be able to map out even the small fraction at the level that we did. Because we can ask all of our questions about the- how many structures do you see, how many times do you see stars moving with another star, how many times do you see big families of stars out there. And all of that you can ask among that little sample that we have highlighted there.

Because once we can ask and answer the questions about the little data sets that we have in there, we can expand and figure out what’s going on elsewhere. And let’s move away from here, Marina, because I’m seeing some questions about other galaxies.           

For instance, Jaxon asked how close is the Andromeda Galaxy to Earth. And we’re going to fly out towards a distance, which will give you that perspective. It’s about 2.5 million light years away, or so.

Remember, we started this at a perspective about 2.5 light months away, where we hung out there. And now, this view that you’re getting is showing the Milky Way with the Large and Small Magellenic Clouds, which are those LMC and SMC labelled objects in there. Those are satellite galaxies, much smaller than our own Milky Way, that are orbiting us. 

And as we move around- And those are in the Southern Hemisphere, so they’re in your South view. You’ll see Andromeda will come up, because Andromeda is actually in the Northern Hemisphere. You can view it from the North. It’s actually the most distant object that you can see with your unaided eye, with just your eye.

But now, every one of the points that you’re seeing- The Milky Way is still there at the center, that beautiful image—not a real- rendering. It’s not an actual image that we’ve ever taken since we’ve never flown outside of the galaxy. Every single one of these colored points in here is another galaxy with billions of its own stars.

Some of them are labelled in here. You can see Andromeda now, up and to the left. The LMC and the SMC are close by. And I want to end on this note for you, that the- the Milky Way, with all of the stars- And I tried to tell you the story of the Milky Way through the stars. 

The Milky Way is also highly influenced by some of these other galaxies. For instance, we are interacting with those two galaxies at the lower part there—SMC and LMC. The Milky Way is eating some of those stars. And they- and those two galaxies are pulling some of the Milky Way’s stars.

And there’s another galaxy in here called the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy the Milky Way is interacting with. The billions and billions of stars that are in these other galaxies are still relevant to think about when you- when we think about our own galaxy. So, from this perspective we’re seeing this- this is now getting more into the larger-scale structure of the universe.

And so, we’re going to end the visual part in here. I’ll take a couple more of your questions because I can see we’ve got a lot of intrigue over this. I see there’s a question from Richard Paul about how thick is the universe from a distance perspective.

I’m not sure I could say how thick the universe is, but I could give you an idea. The Milky Way galaxy- Marina, we could fly in just a little bit so that we could see the- the thinness of the disc of the Milky Way here.

What’s interesting is throughout our observations, astronomers’ observations of the universe, discs are extremely prevalent. So, the Milky Way is something like 150,000 light years across, but it’s very, very thin. So, as we come in, you’ll see it’s more like a pancake.

And that is in part because of the way that the material when it comes together, it collapses into a disc. Similar to how our solar system, it formed as a disc around our Sun. And I’m seeing some- some lovely comments. Cynthia’s saying, “This definitely puts the Earth and other planets into perspective in terms of size.”

I always think of that, as well. That I’m constantly thinking of perspective here. And- in- I love seeing the Milky Way from this perspective because with- A reminder, you can see the small data set that we were playing with that was so important, just off one of the spiral arms there. That’s our home.

And I’ll take just one more question here. Is the center of the Milky Way a lot of stars close together? This comes from Katie. Great question, Katie. Yes, at the center of the galaxy there is most likely a supermassive black hole. We think a supermassive black hole exists at the center of most galaxies.

And that is also the gravitational sink of the galaxy. So, it’s the downtown. It’s where ev- all the bulk of the stars will be. So, you see the highest density of stars out there, in there at the center of the galaxy. And we see this in images of other galaxies, as well.

So, the Hubble Space Telescope has taken amazing images, galleries of images of other galaxies that we think might be reminiscent of what our own galaxy looks like.

Great, so I think we’re out of time here. I want to thank Marina for being such an amazing pilot. Marina, did you have fun on your first Milky Way flight? 

GEMMA: I had a blast, Jackie. Thank you for guiding us through these awesome data sets. 

FAHERTY: And I want to thank Johanna and Daniella, who’ve been answering what I can see was a very busy chat of lots and lots of questions. As a reminder, we do these field trips on Friday and next week at 1pm on our- this same channel, we’re going to be talking about corals and climate.

And check back into our channel for more of our astronomy content as we- as we are pretty regular with our field trips into space. So, I think we’re also going to drop a survey into the- into the chat, so pay attention to that.

And thanks, everybody. Keep looking up, keep paying attention to the stars. And hopefully this gives you a little more perspective on the very galaxy that you live in.