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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.
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.
The Galactic Center is the barycenter of the Milky Way and a corresponding point on the rotational axis of the galaxy. [1][2] Its central massive object is a supermassive black hole of about 4 million solar masses, which is called Sagittarius A*, [3][4][5] a compact radio source which is almost exactly at the galactic rotational center ...
The Great Attractor is a region of gravitational attraction in intergalactic space and the apparent central gravitational point of the Laniakea Supercluster of galaxies that includes the Milky Way galaxy, as well as about 100,000 other galaxies. The observed attraction suggests a localized concentration of mass having the order of 10 16 solar ...
Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953) [1] was an American astronomer. He played a crucial role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology. [2][3] Hubble proved that many objects previously thought to be clouds of dust and gas and classified as "nebulae" were actually galaxies ...
There is evidence that the formation of the Solar System began about 4.6 billion years ago with the gravitational collapse of a small part of a giant molecular cloud. [ 1 ] Most of the collapsing mass collected in the center, forming the Sun, while the rest flattened into a protoplanetary disk out of which the planets, moons, asteroids, and ...
Astronomers have used the Gaia space telescope to spy some of the first building blocks of the Milky Way galaxy: two ancient streams of stars named Shakti and Shiva that helped our home galaxy ...
On November 4, 2013, astronomers reported, based on Kepler space telescope data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars and red dwarfs in the Milky Way. [9] [10] About 11 billion of these may be orbiting Sun-like stars. [11]