Milky Way: "Billions and Billions"
- mrymntcpw
- 18 hours ago
- 2 min read
How large is the universe? How $weet the confection?
“There are in fact 100 billion galaxies, each of which contain something like a billion stars”.
-Carl Sagan
The words "Milky Way" bring two images immediately to mind. Like a stretch of caramel between two pieces of chocolate malt-flavored nugget, our celestial barred spiral galaxy appears as a luminous band of stars, gas, and dust stretching across our night sky.
According to Professor Matthew Stanley at New York University, ”'Galactos' literally means 'the milky thing in the sky,'" The Roman poet, Ovid, wrote in "The Metamorphoses," first published in A.D. 8, saying, "There is a high track, seen when the sky is clear, called the Milky Way, and known for its brightness.” Stanley states, "So there's no way of knowing who first coined it and how it first came to be. It's one of those terms that's so old that its origin is generally forgotten by now.”
The Milky Way contains our home galaxy, which measures 100,000 light-years in diameter. (A light-year is the distance light travels in one year — almost 6 trillion miles, or 9.5 trillion kilometers.) Its core hosts a supermassive black hole — a giant gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape — and its multiple "arms" that spiral from the center hold hundreds of billions of stars, one of which is our own sun.
Now let’s move from star gazing back to Earth and consider a confectionery treat by the same name.
In 1923, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Frank C. Mars invented a candy bar he intended to taste like a malted milk shake. The Milky Way was an instant hit, grossing $800,000 in its first year. Since 2021, the Mars family, which manufacturers pantry staples, snacks and pet food, saw its combined wealth grow to $162 billion from $92 billion.
So here's an item for our bucket lists. Find a location, without ambient light, on a clear moonless night, take out a Milky Way bar, lie down on a soft quilt, gaze upward, and engage in a sensory feast.
CPW
P.S. But wait, James Woodford and Bruno Mars are already ahead of us.
Enjoy a few Mars bars.
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