Faster than the speed of light? This is a journey to the Andromeda galaxy, have you experienced it?

On a moonlit and breezy night, away from the hustle and bustle of the city, countless stars can be seen shining in the night sky as far as our eyes can see. Yet the stars we see with the naked eye are only a small fraction of the many stars in our milky family. In addition to them, there are hundreds of billions of stars shining in galaxies that we can't see. There are mountains outside the mountains, and there are heavens outside the sky, because even the Milky Way is only one of the many galaxies in the universe.

The bright halo in front of it is the Andromeda Galaxy, our milky way's sister galaxy and the closest and farthest galaxy we can see with the naked eye. The Andromeda galaxy is unimaginably far from Earth, about 2.5 million light-years away. Fortunately, by using today's computer simulation techniques, we can travel between galaxies at a faster speed than the speed of light, and in an instant, we can leave the solar system.

It is understood that every planet that has ever existed by humans is only an extremely tiny spot of light for the universe, and even the sun is only a small luminous body in the vast and quiet sea of stars. To fully understand our galactic homeland, this journey would require us to travel more than 500 light-years vertically.

The Milky Way is a 13.6 billion-year-old barred spiral galaxy that resembles a giant axis of rotating arms stretching out in the universe, forming a disk-shaped region spanning more than 100,000 light-years from beginning to end. Incredibly, our Milky Way galaxy is estimated to have about 200 billion to 400 billion stars. When we look farther into the Milky Way, we'll also see many mysterious and wonderful little dots of light, each shining with its own light in the universe we're gradually exploring.

You may notice that these galaxies are not randomly scattered in the night sky, but gravitationally clustered together, scattered on the huge curtain of the universe, like a magnificent cobweb structure.

So far, what we know of the observable universe contains at least a hundred billion galaxies of all kinds, but there may be trillions waiting to be discovered. From a cosmological point of view, some of the galaxies in them are already very close to the Milky Way in comparison, and can even be considered part of the milky way's native star clusters.

The cluster is a gigantic cluster of more than 30 galaxies, all of which are in space of about 10 million light-years or so. The Milky Way is just one of three large galaxies in the Home Group, but the largest is not it but the Andromeda Galaxy. This magnificent cosmic star is named after the area where it can be seen in the Earth's sky, and and Andromeda itself is named after the princess who was saved according to the Greek myth of Perseus. Like the Milky Way, Andromeda is a barred spiral galaxy with a massive spiral arm that contains vast amounts of gas, dust, and dazzling stars.

However, the Andromeda Galaxy is much larger than the Milky Way, with Andromeda spanning an area of more than 200,000 light-years. It also contains stars estimated at around 1 trillion. At its center, within that bright bulge lurks a mysterious supermassive black hole, about 516 million miles in diameter and 830 million kilometers larger than Jupiter's orbit. It contains a mass equivalent to 140 million suns. Compared to Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, it contains only the same mass as 4 million suns. This supermassive black hole is indeed huge.

However, it's not just individual stars that orbit the center of this massive galaxy. The bright pale yellow object right next to it is called M110, and it's one of many satellite galaxies bound to the gravitational pull of the Andromeda galaxy. These less massive galaxies have their own impressive collection of stars, with all stars orbiting their centers, but galaxies and everything in them also orbiting Andromeda.

Just as the moon revolves around the earth, the earth and the moon orbit the sun. The Andromeda galaxy is about 2.5 million light-years away from the Milky Way, but that distance is not eternal because both are moving closer to each other and eventually colliding, which will permanently alter the structure of the galaxy. The two galaxies are moving closer to each other at about 70 miles per second ( or 112 kilometers per second ) , and it is estimated that the collision will occur in about 4.5 billion years. While such collisions may seem to end in destruction, galactic mergers often lead to explosions of star formation that allow the glow of new stars to shine in the night sky.

But unfortunately, humans may not stay on Earth for long to see this spectacular cosmic scene. We may miss these wonders in the future, but one thing we can do now is to get out there and look up at the sky in the clear of night. Find Andromeda, then the Milky Way, and you'll be amazed that the only thing we can see with the naked eye doesn't belong to the Milky Way. But one day, it will join our Milky Way home and create a new Milky Way galaxy, that is, the Micomeda Galaxy. Are you still satisfied with the journey of exploring Virgo? If you like, please let me know in the comments section below. If you want to explore the universe further, why not head to the heart of the Milky Way galaxy and experience an epic journey? Here's the trailer you're looking forward to – are you ready for your next adventure?

The Milky Way is a galaxy that contains our solar system, and its name describes what the galaxy looks like when viewed from Earth: visible in the night sky, a hazy band of light formed by stars that cannot be distinguished by the naked eye alone. The word Milky Way is translated from the Latin via lactea and derives from the Greek γαλακτικ κ κλο (galaktikos k k klos), meaning "milky white ring". From Earth, the Milky Way looks like a band because, from the inside, it has a disk-like structure. Galileo Galilei first used his telescope in 1610 to resolve this band of light into individual stars.

Until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought the Milky Way contained all the stars in the universe. After a major debate between astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heb Curtis in 1920, Edwin Hubble's observations suggested that the Milky Way was just one of many galaxies.

The Milky Way is a bar-shaped spiral galaxy with an estimated visible diameter of 100,000–200,000 light-years. Recent simulations have shown that the dark matter region, which also contains some visible stars, may extend to places nearly 2 million light-years in diameter. The Milky Way has multiple satellite galaxies that are part of the Local Galaxy Group, which is part of the Virgo Supercluster, which itself is part of the Lanickea Supercluster.

It is estimated that the Milky Way contains about 100-400 billion stars, and at least so many planets. The Solar System is located at a radius of about 27,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way, at the inner edge of the Orion Arm, one of the centers of spiraling gas and dust. A star with a core of about 10,000 light-years forms a spherical body and one or more strips radiating out of the spheroids.

At the center of the Milky Way is a strong radio source known as Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole with a mass of 4.100 (±0.034) million solar masses.

Fy: Jane, Marvic, Ashley