Is it a Milky Way or The Milky Way? Depends on if you like chocolate, I suppose.

 

I LOVE chocolate, but the other Milky Way will just blow you away! This was just a tease to get you to our Milky Way galaxy in more detail than ever before.

Our galaxy, THE REAL THING!

This is a 26-second video of our celestial home, the Milky Way, that, if you click the link (THE REAL THING) you will zoom straight into the enter of our galaxy... one of the billion galaxies we know are out there, and see an amazing sight. (Sorry if you have to put up with an ad for a few seconds to get to it, but that's YouTube for you.)

And why would you do that? Because you will see our most incredible universe as never before, filled with billions of other  suns in addition to ours. One of the billion or so of those eensy-teensy white dots is VY Canis Majoris, a sun 2,100 times bigger than ours, 3,900 light years away from us. It's so big that it takes 8 hours, at 186,000 miles per second, for light to travel around its own equator. Then there is the Pistol Star, 100 times as massive as our sun and 10 million times more bright, and more... much more, as they say in commercials.

In case you haven't noticed, I am fascinated by all this that was created, so science says, in the first mili-second of the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago.

To read a good take on what's it like to feel so small Dr. Seuss has great human-like perspective in Horton Hears a Who.  It all puts a different light on who's a big shot and who's not. Hint: certainly none of us.

Now sing a few bars of  Disney's "It's a small world," and see if you can get that out of your head before bed time.