How Was The Milky Way Formed
The Milky way is 13.6 billion years old. The Milky Way has not been here forever. After the big bang the Universe took a break for a while. All there was was gas. Small irregularities allowed gas to gather into large clumps. The clumps heated up and eventually created a nuclear fusion that powers stars. The stars began creating a gravitational attraction to other clumps to come together and make larger groups. The oldest group out of these stars are called globular clusters. Some of these clusters in our galaxy were from our early universe. Our Milky way produces more than 7 stars every year. The only thing is is that it acquires a lot of it´s mass. Our Milky Way is considered as a ¨cannibal¨ because during our growth in our galaxy it sucked up other small galaxies. Astronomers today think that how other galaxies got their size that they are now. Actually our galaxy sucked up another galaxy last year. The Milky Way contains more than 200 billion stars and a lot of gas and dust to make billions. Our Solar System lies 30,00 light-years from our galactic center and 20 light-years above the plane galaxy. More than half of the stars in our galaxy are older than 4.5 billion years old.