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NCERT Solutions Curiosity Chapter 12 & 24712.4 The Milky Way Galaxy and 12.5 The Universe — In-text Questions

Book page 246 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.
What is beyond the Solar System?
Answer

Beyond the Solar System lie other stars — and our whole Solar System is only a tiny part of a galaxy.

  • On a moonless night, from a really dark place, you can see a faint band of light stretching across the sky roughly from north to south. That band is the Milky Way Galaxy, called Ākāśha Gangā in India.
  • A galaxy is a huge system containing millions to billions of stars.
  • Our Solar System is part of the Milky Way Galaxy, and the Sun is just one of its enormous number of stars.
  • The nearest star beyond the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is about 269000 au away — and it too belongs to the Milky Way.
Why the Milky Way looks like a band and not a blob: our galaxy is shaped rather like a flat disc, and we sit inside that disc. Looking along the plane of the disc we see huge numbers of distant stars piled up behind one another, and their combined glow makes a milky band. Looking out of the disc we see far fewer stars.
Q2.
What is beyond the Milky Way Galaxy?
Answer

Many, many more galaxies. Beyond the Milky Way, in outer space, there are countless other galaxies, each with its own millions to billions of stars.

Planets → revolve around a star
Stars, in millions to billions → make a galaxy
Countless galaxies together → make the Universe

Scientists study these distant galaxies to understand how stars are born, how galaxies form and how the Universe itself works.

Did you know? The Indian Astronomical Observatory at Hanle, Ladakh, sitting on Mount Saraswati at one of the highest observatory sites in the world, is one of the places from which Indian scientists study such distant objects.
Q3.
Is there life anywhere else in the Universe?
Answer

We do not know yet — and that is the honest scientific answer. So far, scientists have found no evidence of life anywhere except on the Earth, but the search is very much alive and continuing.

  • The search is directed mostly at exoplanets — planets discovered revolving around other stars in our galaxy.
  • Scientists look for planets at the right distance from their star, where water could stay liquid, and then examine the light coming from them for signs of gases that living things might produce.
  • Within our own Solar System, Mars and some icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn are also being searched.
Why "we do not know" is a good answer: in science, saying that the evidence is not yet in is far better than guessing. A scientist keeps the question open, keeps testing, and changes the answer only when observation demands it. That is exactly the spirit of enquiry this book began with in Chapter 1.
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