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There are interpretations of the Milky Way other than the arms of a distant galaxy. The Milky Way candy bar, invented in 1923 in Minneapolis, is still going strong domestically and globally. Its inventor was one Frank Mars, who gave his name to — you guessed it — the Mars Bar. You’d think he chose the name Milky Way to continue the astronomical theming, but the name just happened to be one of a popular milkshake of the time whose flavors he borrowed. To be fair, the milkshake itself might have been inspired by the galaxy, as the Milky Way was much in the news in the 1920s. It was only then that the astronomy community reached the consensus that it was, in fact, a galaxy, and that there existed many other galaxies just like it in the cosmos.
This MGM cartoon from 1940 also plays around with the idea. Three little kittens (note their resemblance to Jerry the Mouse of Tom and Jerry fame, who was yet to be born) have a collective dream about visiting the Milky Way in a hot air balloon, where they encounter waterfalls of cream and hills of butter. Similar riffing occurred in other cartoons of the time, no doubt confusing young watchers.
As I said earlier, the Milky Way was realized as a galaxy in the 1920s, so 2024, and this whole decade, marks it as its centenniel of a sort. Happy 100th birthday, Milky Way!
When writing speculative fiction, though, no one says the Milky Way has to be part of the picture. What if this galaxy, which looks like a giant malevolent eye with its rings of dark dust, hung in your world’s night sky? Its mythology would be very different.
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Then there’s the world below, which lies in a whole cluster of galaxies, including a curious Ring Galaxy.
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And what if we kept the ring but lost the galactic core?
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The folk of this world could tell a legend of how the core decided to wander off one day, never to return.
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Pity the solar system caught between two interacting galaxies, engaged in a gravitational tug-of-war to tear each other apart and eventually merge. But likely the inhabitants would never know it; galaxies move in a timescale of millions of years. Though they would see some spectacular skies.
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Not all galaxies have to appear as strips or disks in the sky. If a world was within an elliptical galaxy, one would see an enormous glowing ball. This world is on the edges of such a galaxy looking in through bright, closely packed stars. This might also be what a world in a globular cluster would see.
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A world in an irregular galaxy would see a big blobby area in the sky. This one is very bright because it’s forming new stars.
I hope all this has been informative as well as fun. If you’ve got the chance this summer, go off hiking or camping somewhere remote, and see if you can see the Milky Way for yourself!
