Where does the name "MILKY WAY" came from?
On a clear moonless night,far from city lights,you can see a plate band of light spangle with stars stretching across the sky.The Ancient Hindus though this shimmering river of life in the heavens was the source of the sacred river Ganges. To the Ancient Greeks this dim celestial glow looked like milk split across the night sky, and so they called it the milky way. In the 17th Century, Galileo showed that the milky way is millions of stars too dim to be seen as individual points of lights. Now, in the 20th Century we know that these stars, along with our sun, form a huge, slowly revolving disk-our galaxy. The word "galaxy" itself comes from the ancient Greeks and their word for "milk"-galactos. Thus "milky way" is both the name of the bond of life across the night sky and also the name of our galaxy.