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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 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 ...
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 Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a dwarf galaxy and satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. [7] At a distance of around 50 kiloparsecs (163,000 light-years), [2] [8] [9] [10] the LMC is the second- or third-closest galaxy to the Milky Way, after the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal (c. 16 kiloparsecs (52,000 light-years) away) and the possible dwarf irregular galaxy called the Canis Major Overdensity.
Satellite galaxies that orbit from 1,000 ly (310 pc) of the edge of the disc of the Milky Way Galaxy to the edge of the dark matter halo of the Milky Way at 980,000 ly (300 kpc) from the center of the galaxy, [ a ] are generally depleted in hydrogen gas compared to those that orbit more distantly. This is because of their interactions with the ...
The nebula lies in the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way galaxy, at a distance of about 2.0 kiloparsecs (6,500 ly) from Earth. It has a diameter of 3.4 parsecs (11 ly), corresponding to an apparent diameter of some 7 arcminutes , and is expanding at a rate of about 1,500 kilometres per second (930 mi/s), or 0.5% of the speed of light .
A clickable map of the nearby circa one-sixth outer sector of the galaxy, thus clearly showing the Local Arm (Orion Arm) and neighboring arms - as well as the Great Orion Nebula (as a very luminous feature of the less bright Orion molecular cloud complex) and broad-clouds North America Nebula (and Pelican Nebula) which is an intrinsic part of the Radcliffe wave.
The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is a dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way. [ 5 ] Classified as a dwarf irregular galaxy, the SMC has a D 25 isophotal diameter of about 5.78 kiloparsecs (18,900 light-years), [ 1 ][ 3 ] and contains several hundred million stars. [ 5 ] It has a total mass of approximately 7 billion solar masses. [ 6 ]