Question: How does the galaxy work

Elizabeth Pearson answered on 16 Mar 2012:

What do you mean by work? We’re trying to work out a lot of how it was created and how it functions. The current idea is that it was formed when all the gas in the universe clumped together and then started forming stars, so the galaxy came first and then started growing stars rather than stars clumping together to form galaxies.

Within a galaxy everything feeds off each other. Hydrogen clouds collapse into stars, then those stars burn forming all the elements. When that star dies all those elements are oput back on into the interstellar medium, the gas and dust between all the stars. These form new stars and the planets around them and so it goes on. When two galaxies collide theres a ‘starburst’ where more stars are formed than normal.