This is an I-Hard podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Think about where you are right now.

Maybe you're in your car commuting or you'reing the dogs, or at home doing the dishes.

But where are you relative to everyone else? How do you define it? Probably you zoom out and

put yourself in a wider context, your town, your region, your whole country. Listeners to this

pod will likely be inclined to zoom out even further to all of Earth and then

the whole solar system. From there, it's very tempting to skip forward and put our solar system

into its place in the galaxy, then the galaxy into its cluster, and then that cluster within the

supercluster foam. But have we been too hasty?

Is our galaxy so simple just a collection of stars floating around a central black hole?

Or is there more nuance to our galactic context?

We think of the galaxy as mostly stars, but they're formed.

They burn and they die.

There's a constant sloshing of energy back and

forth between those stars and vast clouds of raw material. Where is our solar system relative to those

clouds? Are we in the midst of a galactic fog, or are we floating through an open bubble?

Today on the pod, we'll zoom out to this fascinating scene, understand the dynamics of star

formation and destruction, and let you know exactly where you, we, all of us, stand, galactically

speaking.

Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Galaxy.

Thank you. to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Galaxy. Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith.

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