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The Milky Way [c] is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye.
History of observations. The first known globular cluster, now called M 22, was discovered in 1665 by Abraham Ihle, a German amateur astronomer. The cluster Omega Centauri, easily visible in the southern sky with the naked eye, was known to ancient astronomers like Ptolemy as a star, but was reclassified as a nebula by Edmond Halley in 1677, then finally as a globular cluster in the early 19th ...
Diagram of the Milky Way, with galactic features and the relative position of the Solar System labelled. The Solar System is located in the Milky Way , a barred spiral galaxy with a diameter of about 100,000 light-years containing more than 100 billion stars. [268]
In astronomy, stellar classification is the classification of stars based on their spectral characteristics. Electromagnetic radiation from the star is analyzed by splitting it with a prism or diffraction grating into a spectrum exhibiting the rainbow of colors interspersed with spectral lines. Each line indicates a particular chemical element ...
Location of the Solar System within the Milky Way. The Solar System travels alone through the Milky Way in a circular orbit approximately 30,000 light years from the Galactic Center. Its speed is about 220 km/s. The period required for the Solar System to complete one revolution around the Galactic Center, the galactic year, is in the range of ...
Bottom: Logarithmic scale of the Solar System and Voyager 1 's position.. The heliosphere is the magnetosphere, astrosphere, and outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun. It takes the shape of a vast, tailed bubble-like region of space. In plasma physics terms, it is the cavity formed by the Sun in the surrounding interstellar medium.
White dwarfs are thought to represent the end point of stellar evolution for main-sequence stars with masses from about 0.07 to 10 M ☉. The composition of the white dwarf produced will depend on the initial mass of the star. Current galactic models suggest the Milky Way galaxy currently contains about ten billion white dwarfs.
The Sun, a typical example of a G-type main-sequence star. A G-type main-sequence star (spectral type: G-V), also often, and imprecisely, called a yellow dwarf, or G star, is a main-sequence star (luminosity class V) of spectral type G. Such a star has about 0.9 to 1.1 solar masses and an effective temperature between about 5,300 and 6,000 K.