Question: whats the best part about studying the galaxy?

Roan Haggar answered on 17 Nov 2020:

Hi Jessica! When you say “the galaxy”, I assume you’re talking about the galaxy that we live in, the Milky Way.
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One of the most amazing things I find about the Milky Way is trying to imagine how big it is. The Earth is already pretty big, but the Earth orbits around the Sun, which is our nearest star and is about 100 times the size of Earth. But, the Milky Way is made up of over 100 billion stars like the Sun, which is an enormous number, especially when you think about how huge each one of these stars is! Sometimes I try to picture just how big our galaxy is, but it usually just makes my brain hurt!
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I don’t actually study the Milky Way very much — most of my work focuses on ‘galaxy clusters’, which are groups of hundreds of galaxies like our Milky Way. Given how big one galaxy is, you can imagine how big a group of several hundred would be! One of the things I enjoy about studying these is looking at how they change over time. Galaxies and groups of galaxies change incredibly slowly, but my work focuses on trying to ‘fast-forward’ the Universe to try and understand how these things change, even though it normally takes billions of years.