Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
Definitions: Galaxy |
GalaxyNoun1. A splendid assemblage (especially of famous people). 2. Tufted evergreen perennial herb having spikes of tiny white flowers and glossy green round to heart-shaped leaves that become coppery to maroon or purplish in fall. 3. (astronomy) a collection of star systems; any of the billions of systems each having many stars and nebulae and dust; "`extragalactic nebula' is a former name for `galaxy'". Source: WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. |
Date "galaxy" was first used in popular English literature: sometime before 1321. (references) |
Etymology: Galaxy \Gal"ax*y\, noun; plural Galaxies. [French expression galaxie, from Latin expression galaxias, from the Greek expression (sc. circle), from milk; akin to Latin lac. Compare to Lacteal.]. (Websters 1913) |
| Domain | Definitions |
Computing | Galaxy |
Aerospace | A vast assemblage of stars, nebulae, etc., composing an island universe separated from other such assemblages by great distances.The sun and its family of planets is part of a galaxy commonly called the Milky Way. The nearest galaxy to the Milky Way is the spiral galaxy Andromeda at a distance of approximately 800,000 light years. (references) |
Astronomy | A system of about 100 billion stars. Our Sun is a member of the Milky Way Galaxy, which is sometimes just designated by capitalization: Galaxy. There are billions of galaxies in the observable universe. Exactly when and how galaxies formed in the Universe is a topic of current astronomical research. (references) |
Literature | Galaxy (The). The "Milky Way." A long white luminous track of stars which seems to encompass the heavens like a girdle. According to classic fable, it is the path to the palace of Zeus (1 syl.) or Jupiter. (Greek, gala, milk, genitive, galaktos.) A galaxy of beauty. A cluster, assembly, or coterie of handsome women. Source: Brewer's Dictionary. |
Physics | A component of our universe made up of gas and a large number (usually more than a million) of stars held together by gravity. (references) |
Space | One of billions of systems, each composed of numerous stars, nebulae, and dust. (references) |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
Galaxies come in three main types: ellipticals, spirals, and irregulars. A slightly more extensive description of galaxy types is given by the Hubble sequence. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, sometimes simply called the Galaxy (with uppercase), is a large barred spiral about 30 kiloparsecs or 100,000 light years in diameter, contains about 300 billion stars and has a total mass of about a trillion times the mass of the sun.
In spiral galaxies, the spiral arms have the shape of approximate logarithmic spirals, a pattern that can be theoretically shown to result from a disturbance in a uniformly rotating mass of stars. Like the stars, the spiral arms also rotate around the center, but they do so with constant angular velocity. That means that stars pass in and out of spiral arms. The spiral arms are thought to be areas of high density or density waves. As stars move into an arm, they slow down, thus creating a higher density; this is akin to a "wave" of slowdowns moving along a highway full of moving cars. The arms are visible because the high density facilitates star formation and they therefore harbor many bright and young stars.
The space between galaxies is relatively empty, except for intergalactic gas clouds.
Only few galaxies exist by themselves; these are known as field galaxies. Most galaxies are gravitationally bound to a number of other galaxies. Structures containing up to about 50 galaxies are called groups of galaxies, and larger structures containing many thousands of galaxies packed into an area a few megaparsecs across are called clusters. Superclusters are giant collections containing tens of thousands of galaxies, found in clusters, groups and sometimes individually; as far as we can tell the universe is uniform at scales above this.
Our galaxy is a member of the Local Group, and together with the Andromeda Galaxy dominates it; overall the Local Group contains about 30 galaxies in a space about ten megaparsecs across. The Local Group is part of the Local Supercluster, also known as the Virgo Supercluster.
This account of the history of the investigation of our own and other galaxies is largely taken from [1].
In 1610, Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study the bright band on the night sky known as the Milky Way and discovered that it was composed of a huge number of faint stars. In a treatise in 1755, Immanuel Kant, drawing on earlier work by Thomas Wright, speculated (correctly) that the galaxy might be a rotating body of a huge number of stars, held together by gravitational forces akin to the solar system but on much larger scales. The resulting disk of stars would be seen as a band on the sky from our perspective inside the disk. Kant also conjectured that some of the nebulae visible in the night sky might be separate galaxies.
Towards the end of the 18th century, Charles Messier compiled a catalog containing the 109 brightest nebulae, later followed by a catalog of 5000 nebulae assembled by William Herschel. In 1845, William Parsons constructed a new telescope and was able to distinguish between elliptical and spiral nebulae. He also managed to make out individual point sources in some of these nebulae, lending credence to Kant's earlier conjecture. However, the nebulae were not universally accepted as distant separate galaxies until the matter was settled by Edwin Hubble in the early 1920s using a new telescope. He was able to resolve the outer parts of some spiral nebulae as collections of individual stars and identified some Cepheid variables, thus allowing to estimate the distance to the nebulae: they were far too distant to be part of the Milky Way. In 1936, Hubble produced a classification system for galaxies that is used to this day, the Hubble sequence.
The first attempt to describe the shape of the Milky Way and the position of the Sun within it was carried out by Herschel in 1785 by carefully counting the number of stars in different regions of the sky. Using a refined approach, Kapteyn in 1920 arrived at the picture of a small (diameter ~15 kiloparsecs) ellipsoid galaxy with the sun close to the center. A different method by Harlow Shapley based on the cataloging of globular clusters lead to a radically different picture: a flat disk with diameter ~70 kiloparsecs and the sun far from the center. Both analyses failed to take into account the absorption of light by interstellar dust present in the galactic plane; once Robert Julius Trumpler had quantified this effect in 1930 by studying open clusters, the present picture of our galaxy as described above emerged.
In 1944, van de Hulst predicted microwave radiation at a wave length of 21 centimetres, resulting from interstellar atomic hydrogen gas; this radiation was observed in 1951. This radiation allowed for much improved study of the Galaxy, since it is not affected by dust absorption and its Doppler shift can be used to map the motion of the gas in the Galaxy. These observations led to the postulation of a rotating bar structure in the center of the Galaxy. With improved radio telescopes, hydrogen gas could also be traced in other galaxies. In the 1970s it was realized that the total visible mass of galaxies (from stars and gas) does not properly account for the speed of the rotating gas, thus leading to the postulation of dark matter.
Beginning in the 1990s, the Hubble Space Telescope yielded improved observations. Among other things, it established that the missing dark matter in our galaxy cannot solely consist of inherently faint and small stars. It photographed the Hubble Deep Field, providing evidence for hundreds of billions of galaxies in existence in the visible universe alone.
Galaxy is also a type of chocolate candy bar made by the Mars company.
See also: Galaxy science fiction, C-5 Galaxy
Larger scale structures
History
Also see
References
External links
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Galaxy."
Synonyms: GalaxySynonyms: beetleweed (n), cold's foot (n), extragalactic nebula (n), galax (n), wandflower (n). (additional references) |
| Context | Synonyms within Context (source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus). |
Assemblage | Crowd, throng, group; flood, rush, deluge; rabble, mob, press, crush, cohue, horde, body, tribe; crew, gang, knot, squad, band, party; swarm, shoal, school, covey, flock, herd, drove; atajo; bunch, drive, force, mulada; remuda; roundup; array, bevy, galaxy; corps, company, troop, troupe, task force; army, regiment; (combatants); host; (multitude); populousness. |
Multitude | Noun: multitude; numerous; Adjective: numerosity, numerality; multiplicity; profusion; (plenty); legion, host; great number, large number, round number, enormous number; a quantity, numbers, array, sight, army, sea, galaxy; scores, peck, bushel, shoal, swarm, draught, bevy, cloud, flock, herd, drove, flight, covey, hive, brood, litter, farrow, fry, nest; crowd; (assemblage); lots; all in the world and his wife. |
Repute | Chief; (master); first fiddle; (proficient); cynosure, mirror; flower, pink, pearl; paragon; (perfection); choice and master spirits of the age; elite; star,.sun, constellation, galaxy. ornament, honor, feather in one's cap, halo, aureole, nimbus; halo of glory, blaze of glory, blushing honors; laurels; (trophy). |
World | Heavenly bodies, stars, asteroids; nebulae; galaxy, milky way, galactic circle, via lactea, ame no kawa. |
| Source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus. | |
Crosswords: Galaxy |
| English words defined with "galaxy": andromeda ♦ extragalactic ♦ galactic, Galactic circle, Galaxies ♦ Hubble constant, Hubble's constant ♦ Jan Hendrix Oort ♦ Milky Way, Milky Way Galaxy, Milky Way System ♦ Oort ♦ spiral galaxy, spiral nebula ♦ Via Lactea. (references) |
| Specialty definitions using "galaxy": Charles Messier, cosmic radio waves, Cosmic Rays, cosmological distance ♦ dust grains ♦ galactic halo, galactic radiation, galactic radio waves, globular cluster, Google ♦ Hubble, Edwin P. 1889-1953 ♦ Interstellar Plasma ♦ LMC ♦ M100 ♦ not entirely unlike X ♦ SMC. (references) |
| Etymologies containing "galaxy": galactic. (references) |
| Domain | Usage | |
Screenplays | Join the Mobile Infantry and save the Galaxy. Service guarantees citizenship. (Starship Troopers; writing credit: Edward Neumeier. Based on the novel by Robert A. Heinlein.) One minute you're defending the whole galaxy, and, suddenly, you find yourself sucking down Darjeeling with Marie Antoinette. (Toy Story; writing credit: John Lasseter; Andrew Stanton) Daddy, if you dance like that in front of my friends I have to go live in another galaxy. Oh daddy, your dancing went out with pop-up fuels it is practically 20th century. (The Jetsons; writing credit: Aarne Tarkas) Do you understand what it means in the context of the rest of humanity for your brain to be 'a little off'? That puts you in another galaxy far, far away. (The Dead Zone; writing credit: Aleksandar Djordjevic) I discovered the Lost Galaxy. (Power Rangers Wild Force; writing credit: Amit Bhaumik; Jill Donnellan) | |
Lyrics | Galaxy defenders. ("Men in Black"; performing artist: Will Smith) | |
Movie/TV Titles | Birdman and the Galaxy Trio (1967) Outer Galaxy Gazette (1964) A Girl's Guide to the Galaxy (2002) Barbara's Galaxy (1999) Galaxy Fraulein Yuna Returns: Dawn of the Dark Sisters (1999) | |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | ||
| Domain | Title | ||
References | |||
Books | |||
Theater & Movies | |||
Music |
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High Tech |
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Consumer Goods | |||
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |||
| Thumbnail | Description & Credit | Thumbnail | Description & Credit |
 | Two astronomers have discovered that our own Milky Way galaxy and most of its neighboring ...Credit: NASA. |  | The Key Project team used this Hubble telescope view of the magnificent spiral galaxy, NGC ...Credit: NASA. |
 | NGC 253 is a large, almost edge-on spiral galaxy, and is one of the nearest galaxies beyond ...Credit: NASA. |  | These are composite images of the galaxy 0313-192, the first spiral galaxy known to be ...Credit: NASA. |
 | Resembling curling flames from a campfire, this magnificent nebula in a neighboring galaxy is ...Credit: NASA. |  | The appearance of a galaxy can depend strongly on the color of the light with which it is ...Credit: NASA. |
 | A very small, faint galaxy -- possibly one of the long sought "building blocks" of present-day ...Credit: NASA. |  | The energy source needed to create and maintain the galactic jet in galaxy PKS 0521-36 is ...Credit: NASA. |
 | New detailed images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show a "late-blooming" galaxy, a small, ...Credit: NASA. |  | A nearby black hole is hurtling like a cannonball through the disk of our galaxy. The ...Credit: NASA. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |||
| Title | Author | Quote |
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams | Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | ||
| Subject | Topic | Quote |
Business | In the van segment, GM's Opel Zafira managed to take away sales from the other two large German competitors, the VW Sharan and Ford Galaxy. (references) | |
As a result of this, several U.S. firms, including Galaxy and Sky TV, began offering direct-to-home television in mid 1998. The mobile and non-geostationary satellite services are offered in an open competitive market environment. (references) | ||
Civil Liberties | Togo | Two of these, Radio Avenir and Galaxy FM, are associated with the ruling RPT Party. (references) |
Source: compiled by the editor from ICON Group International, Inc.; see credits. | ||
| Speaker | Phrase(s) |
William Shatner | I don't need to be lectured by you. I was out saving the galaxy when your grandfather was in diapers. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| "Galaxy" is generally used as a noun (singular) -- approximately 100.00% of the time. "Galaxy" is used about 611 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English. Its rank is based on over 700,000 words used in the English language. Some parts-of-speech are not covered due to the samples used by the British National Corpus. (note: percents less than one-hundredth of one percent have been omitted) |
| Parts of Speech | Percent | Usage per 100 Million Words | Rank in English |
| Noun (singular) | 100% | 611 | 10,546 |
Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.
| Country | Name |
| USA | Galaxy Nutritional Foods, Inc. |
| (more examples...) |
Source: compiled by the editor from Icon Group International, Inc.
Expressions using "galaxy": milky way galaxy ♦ spiral galaxy ♦ the galaxy. Additional references. | |
| Hyphenated Usage | |
Beginning with "galaxy": galaxy-class, galaxy-galaxy, galaxy-swap, galaxy-wide, galaxy-with. | |
Ending with "galaxy": galaxy-galaxy. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com. |
| Expression | Frequency per Day |
star war galaxy | 8,539 |
galaxy | 4,234 |
audio galaxy | 900 |
galaxy golf | 622 |
galaxy of terror | 383 |
galaxy review star war | 365 |
cinemas galaxy | 365 |
la galaxy | 298 |
ford galaxy | 292 |
hitchhiker guide to the galaxy | 292 |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| Language | Translations for "galaxy"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses. | |
Albanian | galaktikë, kashta e kumrit. (various references) | |
Arabic | مجرة فضائية, مجرة درب التبانة, درب التبانة (milky way). (various references) | |
Bulgarian | галактика, плеяда (constellation, pleiad). (various references) | |
Chinese | 星系 (Galaxies). (various references) | |
Czech | mléèná dráha (milky way). (various references) | |
Danish | fordeling (allocation, allotment, breakdown, dispatching, dissemination, distribution, make-up, partition, regulating, shaping, spread, spreading). (various references) | |
Farsi | کهکشان , جاده شیری (Jacob'sladder). (various references) | |
Finnish | Linnunrata (the Milky Way). (various references) | |
French | galaxie. (various references) | |
German | milchstraße (Milky Way). (various references) | |
Greek | γαλαξίας. (various references) | |
Hebrew | 'לקסי". (various references) | |
Hungarian | tejútrendszer, galaxis. (various references) | |
Indonesian | galaksi. (various references) | |
Italian | galassia. (various references) | |
Japanese Kanji | 銀河系 , 銀河 (Milky Way), 星雲 (nebula). (various references) | |
Japanese Katakana | ぎ"がけい, ぎ"が (Milky Way), せいう" (blue sky, fortune, high rank, nebula, prosperity, tendency, trend). (various references) | |
Korean | 은 (Galaxies, silver). (various references) | |
Manx | Raad Mooar Ree Gorree (Milky Way), ard-chruinnaght. (various references) | |
Pig Latin | alaxygay.(various references) | |
Portuguese | galantina, galáxia, disposição galáctica. (various references) | |
Romanian | galaxie. (various references) | |
Russian | галактика. (various references) | |
Serbo-Croatian | galaksija. (various references) | |
Spanish | galaxia. (various references) | |
Swedish | lysande samling. (various references) | |
Thai | ทางช้างเผือก, กลุ่ม"าวกาแล็กซี. (various references) | |
Turkish | galaksi, gökada, yıldızlar geçidi, seçkin topluluk, samanyolu (milky way, the galaxy, via lactea). (various references) | |
Ukranian | чумацький шлях, галактика, плеяда (constellation, pleiad). (various references) | |
Vietnamese | nhóm (bevy, coterie, crowd, groupment, number, plump). (various references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various translation references. | ||
| Language | Period | Translations |
| Late Latin | 300-700 | galaxias. (various references) |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | ||
Derivations | |
Words ending with "galaxy": metagalaxy, protogalaxy. (additional references) | |
| |
"Galaxy" is suggested in spellcheckers for the following: galact, galagy, galary, galaxay, galaxcy, galaxi, Galaxia, galaxie, galay, galex, galexy, galixy, gallaxy, gallay, Gallix, galxy, glax, glaxie, Golay. (additional references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor, based on several corpora (additional references). | |
| # of Phoneme Matches | Pronunciation | Word(s) rhyming with "galaxy" (pronounced ga"luksē) |
| 3 | -k s ē | apoplexy, boxy, doxie, doxy, epoxy, folksy, foxy, heterodoxy, hydroxy, maxi, Moxie, Nixie, orthodoxy, oxy, pixie, proxy, sexy, taxi, waxy. |
Source: compiled by the editor (additional references); see credits. | ||
Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams | |
| Words within the letters "a-a-g-l-x-y" | |
-1 letter: galax, gayal. | |
-2 letters: agly, alga, axal, gala. | |
-3 letters: aal, aga, ala, gal, gay, lag, lax, lay. | |
-4 letters: aa, ag, al, ax, ay, la, ya. | |
| Words containing the letters "a-a-g-l-x-y" | |
+4 letters: metagalaxy. | |
+5 letters: hexagonally, protogalaxy. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro. | |
Hexadecimal (or equivalents, 770AD-1900s) (references)47 61 6C 61 78 79 |
| Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519; backwards) (references)
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| American Sign Language (origins from 1620-1817 in Italy and, especially, France) (references)
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| Semaphore (1791, in France) (references)
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| Braille (1829, in France) (references)
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Morse Code (1836) (references)--. .- .-.. .- -..- -.--. |
| Dancing Men (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1903) (references)
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Binary Code (1918-1938, probably earlier) (references)01000111 01100001 01101100 01100001 01111000 01111001 |
HTML Code (1990) (references)G a l a x y |
ISO 10646 (1991-1993) (references)0047 0061 006C 0061 0078 0079 |
| British Sign Language (Fingerspelling, BSL; 1992, British Deaf Association Dictionary of British Sign Language) (references)
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Encryption (beginner's substitution cypher): (references)416778679091 |
| 1. Definition 2. Synonyms 3. Crosswords 4. Usage: Modern | 5. Usage: Commercial 6. Images: Slideshow 7. Images: Photo Album 8. Quotations: Fiction | 9. Quotations: Non-fiction 10. Quotations: Spoken 11. Usage Frequency 12. Names: Company Usage | 13. Expressions 14. Expressions: Internet 15. Translations: Modern 16. Translations: Ancient | 17. Derivations 18. Rhymes 19. Anagrams 20. Orthography | 21. Bibliography |
Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
