Maiden Vein tangent: Milky Way tour stop 2 - StarChild

This week's word of the week from the Dictionary of Newfoundland English is Maiden Vein which refers to the Milky Way.

Stop 2 of this week's Maiden Vein - Milky Way Tour:

The Milky Way explained for kids at StarChild.com:


The Milky Way is over 100,000 light-years wide. It is called a spiral galaxy because it has long arms which spin around like a giant pinwheel. Our Sun is a star in one of the arms. When you look up at the night sky, most of the stars you see are in one of the Milky Way arms.
Before we had telescopes, people could not see many of the stars very clearly. They blurred together in a white streak across the sky. A myth by the ancient Greeks said this white streak was a "river of milk". The ancient Romans called it the Via Galactica, or "road made of milk". This is how our galaxy became known as the Milky Way.

**********************

REDEFiNE iT: Dictionary of Newfoundland English is brought to you by the Newfoundland based audio book publisher Rattling Books.