Scientists have discovered two ancient streams of stars Shiva and Shakti, which are considered as the beginning of our galaxy!
Named after Hindu deities Shakti and Shiva, they are regarded as earliest building blocks of Milky Way. There are numerous myths and legends about its origin, the cluster of stars that makes a unique bright streak across the night sky, clearly observed in summertime.
In this article, we will discuss about some unknown facts and importance of the guardian of the galaxy, Milky way.
Without a simple telescope, we can observe over 6,000 stars from Earth. You may feel that's a lot, but, that is exactly very small. Let me help you out to understand. Do you like to eat pizza? Let's consider, a pepperoni pizza is our universe. And there are multiple pieces of pepperonis over a pizza. Here one pepperoni indicates one milky way. And, we are very small part of it. Basically, there are 20 million more stars that we cannot observe. Majority of the stars are either too far or too faint. Sometimes, they are also blocked by cosmic dust.
Rachael Beaton, an astronomer at Princeton University once mentioned: “From my perspective as a scientist, this feels more like putting together a puzzle than being inside of an Agatha Christie style mystery.”
The Milky Way is a massive spiral-shaped galaxy comprising hundreds of billions of stars. The Milky Way got its name from a Greek mythology about the goddess Hera. According to the mythology, the goddess sprayed milk across the sky.
The disk of Milky way is approximately 100,000 light years in diameter. Generally, a light year is the distance light travels in a year, that is around 9.5 trillion km. Stars extend from this large galactic center in different lengthy spiraling arms, with the sun residing on one of those. Among billions of galaxies, the Milky Way is our home, our own galaxy in this universe.
According to Hindu mythology, the union between Shiva and Shakti eventually led to the cosmos formation. As the discovery of Shakti and Shiva helped scientists to understand earliest stages of universe, researchers choose the name.
“Shakti and Shiva are comprised of stars with similar chemical compositions that formed 12-13 billion years ago. Each of the structures has a mass about 10 million times greater than our sun,” the researchers said.
There is a saying that, observation can solve multiple mysteries. So, we must have the right vision to observe our guardian to know about our inception. Astronomers from different countries have been trying to find the answer about our beginning for centuries. The most powerful telescope in the world, James Webb Telescope has helped getting several answers about the universe. Now we got an idea about the structure of black hole, death of stars, and so on. The cosmos is continuously expanding since the Big Bang.
“If the Universe is really expanding faster than we thought, it might be much younger than the currently accepted 13.8 billion years,” according to an astronomer associated with European Space Agency (ESA).
Still, there lies numerous questions like how and when planets start forming around a new star? Hopefully, in coming years, with advanced tools, we will be able to find those answers.
