• Question: why is the milky way, called the milky way?

    Asked by littlechatterbox to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      The name comes from the Romans, who saw the big light streak across the sky and decided that it was milk from some god or other. There are lots of different myths about it but one says that Zeus/Jupiter was nursing Hercules/heracles on Hera/Juno’s teet when she woke up and threw him away, spraying the milk everywhere.

      Yep, they were a bit weird.

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      When you see the milky way, it does look a sort of milky colour. You can see it in a clear sky on a very dark night as a streak of lots of stars – that’s because you’re looking along the line of the galaxy, so all the stars that are on a flat plate are lined up in front of you.

      Scientists recently added up all the colours of the stars in the milky way to get the real colour of our galaxy. The colour they found was ‘like snow an hour after dawn’. I think they’d stayed up too late!

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      It’s just how it looks from a really dark place. I found a beautiful picture of this recently which you can see here: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110221.html

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 21 Mar 2012:

      Because if you look up and see the Milky Way, it looks pale and luminescent (glowing) which is a bit like milk “spilt into the sky”.

      Karen’s link to a picture is really gorgeous, although the photographer used a special lens to fit the sky in (which is why it is “bent”).

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