The term universe refers to everything that exists including galaxies and the space between them. A galaxy is a massive cluster of stars millions or billions held together by gravity. The Milky Way is the name of the galaxy in which we live. Many people are not clear about the difference between our Solar System our Milky Way Galaxy and the Universe.

A galaxy is a gravitationally bound system of stars stellar remnants interstellar gas dust and dark matter. The word is derived from the Greek galaxies milky a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. Galaxies range in size from dwarfs with just a few hundred million stars to giants with one hundred trillion 1014 stars each orbiting its galaxy's center of mass.

Galaxies are categorized according to their visual morphology as elliptical, spiral, or irregular. Many are thought to have supermassive black holes at their centers. The Milky Way's central black hole is known as Sagittarius. That has a mass four million times greater than the Sun. As of March 2016, GN-z11 is the oldest and most distant galaxy observed. It has a commoving distance of 32 billion light-years from Earth and is seen as it existed just 400 million years after the Big Bang.

Our Solar System consists of our star the Sun and its orbiting planets including Earth along with numerous moons asteroids comet material, rocks, and dust. Our Sun is just one star among the hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. If we shrink the Sun down to smaller than a grain of sand we can imagine our Solar System to be small enough to fit into the palm of your hand. Pluto would orbit about an inch from the middle of your palm.

Your galactic fleet starts with a small cruiser but as your space base develops, you’ll get to control battleships and even supermassive space cruisers.
Start with a small spaceship but as your base grows and develops, you’ll graduate to commanding huge battleships and super-heavy spaceships.

Battle in a galaxy on fire online with real opponents in the multiplayer Space Wars game mode and develop your space fleet. It's unlikely that any life is currently thriving on Mars. But scientists think the planet may have hosted life long ago when it had an atmosphere as thick as Earth's. This would have kept the Martian surface warm enough to hold liquid water.

He said he was honored to test the customer experience and declared Welcome to the dawn of a new space age. It’s just magical I’m just taking it all in. It’s just unreal said Branson, who popped a bottle of champagne after he and his crew were presented their Virgin Galactic astronaut wings. Sir Richard flew to the lower edge of space and back to planet Earth on Sunday in the first fully crewed flight from his private space tourism firm Virgin Galactic.

VMS Eve and just after 11 a.m. reached an altitude of 46,000 feet, which is higher than commercial airlines fly. Branson 70 served as a mission specialist on the flight the fourth crewed spaceflight for Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity spacecraft. Unity was launched from the Eve mother ship at an altitude of 50,000 feet and a live stream video showed it shooting into space. Within 30 seconds the spacecraft reached Mach 2 speed and a few seconds later hit Mach 3 at an altitude of weightlessness.

The onboard video showed Branson and the three other astronauts smiling as they looked out the windows of the spacecraft. They briefly unbuckled their seatbelts to float around the cabin and take given the curvature of Earth.