Stand outside on a clear night and look up. You’ll see that there are more stars along the Milky Way (shown above).
Our galaxy looks like a fuzzy gray ribbon of light in the sky. But a low-power telescope gives us a better view. It shows that the Milky Way is made up of countless stars. They are just really, really far away. We can’t see each star by itself with just our eyes.
Astronomers have been looking at the Milky Way with high-power telescopes for the last 200 years. They have found nebulae in many different colors and shapes. Spiral-shaped nebulae are like whole cities of stars. Those are called galaxies. Nebulae can tell us things about how stars developed. That’s because they are part of the birth and death of stars.
