Beyond the Stars: The Galaxies

Abstract

With Galileo’s discovery that the Milky Way (our galaxy) consists of countless bright tiny dots (which he correctly interpreted as stars at vast distances) astronomy took its first step beyond the naked-eye stars that seem to fill the sky every moonless night. But until large, optically accurate telescopes were constructed nothing beyond Galileo’s speculations about the dynamics and structure of the Milky Way could be deduced nor could Galileo’s speculations be confirmed. But this did not deter people who gloried in observing the stars with their unaided eyes from drawing conclusions about what they saw. Thus, as previously noted, Thomas Wright, a sailor, whose own travels had acquainted him thoroughly with the visible stars and the Milky Way, proposed in 1740 that the Milky Way was, indeed, a collection of stars. Wright concluded that the stars around us in the sky are not distributed equally in all directions and throughout all of space but are concentrated in a relatively thin band, and that our sun is a member of this remarkable collection of stars.

Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow