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The Milky Way is approximately 890 billion to 1.54 trillion times the mass of the Sun in total (8.9 × 10 11 to 1.54 × 10 12 solar masses), [7][8][9] although stars and planets make up only a small part of this. Estimates of the mass of the Milky Way vary, depending upon the method and data used.
The Local Group is the galaxy group that includes the Milky Way, where Earth is located. It has a total diameter of roughly 3 megaparsecs (10 million light-years; 9 × 10 19 kilometres), [1] and a total mass of the order of 2 × 10 12 solar masses (4 × 10 42 kg). [2] It consists of two collections of galaxies in a "dumbbell" shape; the Milky ...
MilkyWay@home is a volunteer computing project in the astrophysics category, running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. Using spare computing power from over 38,000 computers run by over 27,000 active volunteers as of November 2011, [3] the MilkyWay@home project aims to generate accurate three-dimensional dynamic models of stellar streams in the ...
Navigation in the Milky Way is also identified with cardinal directions, indicating distance from the Sol System: for example, Ultima Segmentum, the largest segmentum in the Imperium of Man, is located to the galactic east of the Sol System. The 0° "north" in Imperial maps does not correspond to the 0° in the real-world.
There are 61 small galaxies confirmed to be within 420 kiloparsecs (1.4 million light-years) of the Milky Way, [2] but not all of them are necessarily in orbit, and some may themselves be in orbit of other satellite galaxies. The only ones visible to the naked eye are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which have been observed since prehistory.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey or SDSS is a major multi-spectral imaging and spectroscopic redshift survey using a dedicated 2.5-m wide-angle optical telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, United States. The project began in 2000 and was named after the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which contributed significant funding.
Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to Earth after the Sun, located 4.25 light-years away in the southern constellation of Centaurus. This object was discovered in 1915 by Robert Innes. It is a small, low-mass star, too faint to be seen with the naked eye, with an apparent magnitude of 11.13. Its Latin name means the 'nearest [star] of Centaurus'.
Sagittarius A*, abbreviated as Sgr A* (/ ˈ s æ dʒ ˈ eɪ s t ɑːr / SADGE-AY-star [3]), is the supermassive black hole [4] [5] [6] at the Galactic Center of the Milky Way.Viewed from Earth, it is located near the border of the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius, about 5.6° south of the ecliptic, [7] visually close to the Butterfly Cluster (M6) and Lambda Scorpii.