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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.
Orion Arm. The Orion Arm, also known as the Orion–Cygnus Arm, is a minor spiral arm within the Milky Way Galaxy spanning 3,500 light-years (1,100 parsecs) in width and extending roughly 20,000 light-years (6,100 parsecs) in length. [2] This galactic structure encompasses the Solar System, including Earth.
The Laniakea Supercluster encompasses approximately 100,000 galaxies stretched out over 160 Mpc (520 million ly). It has the approximate mass of 10 17 solar masses, or 100,000 times that of our galaxy, which is almost the same as that of the Horologium Supercluster. [3] It consists of four subparts, which were known previously as separate ...
Story at a glance (NewsNation) — This summer, you can gaze at the Milky Way without the need for a telescope, but you may have to drive a bit to get a good view. The center of our galaxy is ...
Astronomers using the Gaia space telescope have located two ancient streams of stars that helped the Milky Way galaxy grow and evolve more than 12 billion years ago.
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 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 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 ]