Hyperspace Tour of The Galactic Neighborhood

Here’s the coolest tour you could ever think of! It’s faster than the speed of light and takes you straight to our galactic neighborhood.

You’ll witness colorful nebulas, a distant supernova, even a dwarf spheroidal galaxy. You’ll enjoy the amazing views from your window and will be offered space-themed snacks.

You’ll find out what a ‘parsec’ is. And it’s not slang for “pair of socks”. This is gonna be the greatest sightseeing tour you’ve ever been on, I promise. Fasten your seatbelts and get ready to be surprised multiple times! Our Intergalactic Cruiser is ready to set off.

– Our first main item of interest will be an intense star-forming region known as M42, the Orion Nebula;
– The Horse Head nebula: the newborn star at the top of the horse’s head has a strong solar wind that is deforming the shape of the nebular cloud;
– The “M”in M43 and M45 stands for “Messier”;
– Charles Messier was a French astronomer in the 18th century. He published a catalog of 110 fuzzy objects as seen through an early telescope;
– As we approach the Trapezium star cluster in the center, the bright star Theta-C sends out a solar wind at 5 million miles an hour;
– Theta-C is a megastar 200,000 x’s brighter than the Sun. It will go supernova in about a million years;
– Our Sun, which you cannot distinguish from this height above the galaxy, is in the Orion Spur that lies between the outer Perseus arm and the inner Sagittarius arm;
– Only 20% of distant galaxies contain magnetic bars in their cores;
– The Large Magellanic Cloud – LMC to astronomers – is an irregular dwarf satellite galaxy of the Milky Way containing about 30 billion stars with a dynamic star-forming region called the Tarantula Nebula;
– A parsec is about 3.26 light-years, a light-year is about 5.88 trillion miles. The word “parsec” is a combination of two words: “parallax” and “second.”
– 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud is the closest supernova to Earth since 1604, which happened in the Milky Way;
– M33, The Triangulum Galaxy, the third and last spiral galaxy of our Local Group. Located in the small constellation of Triangulum, Latin for “triangle”, good guess — M33 is about half the size of the Milky Way.

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