<P> According to Jamil Ragep, the Persian astronomer Naṣīr al - Dīn al - Ṭūsī (1201--1274) in his Tadhkira writes: "The Milky Way, i.e. the Galaxy, is made up of a very large number of small, tightly clustered stars, which, on account of their concentration and smallness, seem to be cloudy patches . Because of this, it was likened to milk in color ." </P> <P> Actual proof of the Milky Way consisting of many stars came in 1610 when Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study the Milky Way and discovered that it is composed of a huge number of faint stars . In a treatise in 1755, Immanuel Kant, drawing on earlier work by Thomas Wright, speculated (correctly) that the Milky Way might be a rotating body of a huge number of stars, held together by gravitational forces akin to the Solar System but on much larger scales . The resulting disk of stars would be seen as a band on the sky from our perspective inside the disk . Kant also conjectured that some of the nebulae visible in the night sky might be separate "galaxies" themselves, similar to our own . Kant referred to both the Milky Way and the "extragalactic nebulae" as "island universes", a term still current up to the 1930s . </P> <P> The first attempt to describe the shape of the Milky Way and the position of the Sun within it was carried out by William Herschel in 1785 by carefully counting the number of stars in different regions of the visible sky . He produced a diagram of the shape of the Milky Way with the Solar System close to the center . </P> <P> In 1845, Lord Rosse constructed a new telescope and was able to distinguish between elliptical and spiral - shaped nebulae . He also managed to make out individual point sources in some of these nebulae, lending credence to Kant's earlier conjecture . </P>

Where are o and b stars located in the milky way