On a dark night, without a moon and away from large cities, we can perceive among the stars in the sky a whiteish strip: the Milky Way. Using binoculars we can discover that it is made up of innumerable stars. What does this strange accumulation of heavenly bodies mean?

For centuries this was a question without an answer. At the beginning of the 20th century an ingenious astronomer called Shapley, suggested that the universe had the shape of a disc. So that the Milky Way was the result of looking at the disc in profile from the side.

Everything changed when Hubble showed that the cosmos was full of island-universies like ours, which we now know as galaxies. On the right we can see the photograph of a galaxy similar to ours.

To see the characteristics of our galaxy, click