{"id":21644,"date":"2013-03-30T21:39:45","date_gmt":"2013-03-30T19:39:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.ikaria.ch\/?p=21644"},"modified":"2024-04-08T01:16:05","modified_gmt":"2024-04-07T23:16:05","slug":"the-milky-way-as-seen-from-ikaria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ursula.ikaria.ch\/en\/the-milky-way-as-seen-from-ikaria\/","title":{"rendered":"The Milky Way as seen from Ikaria"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"milky-way_erifi_\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Location: Erifi – Rahes<\/p>\n

Photo and copyright by George Tsimpidis 2012<\/p>\n

The Milky Way<\/strong> in the narrower sense is the band-shaped brightening in the night sky, which spans the celestial sphere around a great circle as a prominent plane of symmetry of the Milky Way system. In a broader sense, or in colloquial language, the term is also an abbreviated name for the entire Milky Way system<\/strong>, also known as the Galaxy<\/strong>. This barred spiral galaxy type star system is home to our solar system. Other extragalactic star islands are called galaxies.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Our star system is named after the Milky Way, which, as a clear-eyed interior view of the system from Earth, appears like a milky brush stroke across the firmament. The fact that this whitish band is actually made up of around 100 to 300 billion stars was only discovered in 1609 by Galileo Galilei, who was the first to observe the phenomenon through a telescope.<\/p>\n

Even in ancient times, the Milky Way was known as a bright, narrow strip in the night sky. Its ancient Greek name galaxias (\u03b3\u03b1\u03bb\u03b1\u03be\u03af\u03b1\u03c2) \u2013 from which the modern term \u201cgalaxy\u201d comes \u2013 is derived from the word gala (\u03b3\u03ac\u03bb\u03b1, milk). Like the German word \u201cMilky Way\u201d, the ancient Greek term is also based on the \u201cmilky\u201d appearance.<\/p>\n

An ancient Greek legend attempts to explain this term mythologically: Zeus allowed his son Heracles, who had been given to him by the mortal woman Alcmene, to drink from the breast of his divine wife Hera while she was sleeping. In this way, Heracles was supposed to receive divine powers. But he sucked so violently that Hera woke up and pushed back the unfamiliar infant; a stream of her milk was sprayed all over the sky.<\/p>\n

Source: Wikipedia<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Location: Erifi – Rahes Photo and copyright by George Tsimpidis 2012 The Milky Way in the narrower sense is the band-shaped brightening in the night sky, which spans the celestial sphere around a great circle as a prominent plane of symmetry of the Milky Way system. In a broader sense, or in colloquial language, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":21645,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[215],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ursula.ikaria.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ursula.ikaria.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ursula.ikaria.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ursula.ikaria.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ursula.ikaria.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ursula.ikaria.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ursula.ikaria.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ursula.ikaria.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ursula.ikaria.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ursula.ikaria.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}