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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.
The Fermi paradox can be asked in two ways. [ note 1 ] The first is, "Why are no aliens or their artifacts found on Earth, or in the Solar System?". If interstellar travel is possible, even the "slow" kind nearly within the reach of Earth technology, then it would only take from 5 million to 50 million years to colonize the galaxy. [ 26 ]
Intergalactic travel is the hypothetical travel between galaxies. Because the Milky Way and its closest neighbors are separated by millions of light-years, any such venture would also require millions of years based on current physics.
This is the boundary of the Solar System to interstellar space. The outermost region of the Solar System is the theorized Oort cloud, the source for long-period comets, extending to a radius of 2,000–200,000 AU. The closest star to the Solar System, Proxima Centauri, is 4.25 light-years (269,000 AU) away. Both stars belong to the Milky Way ...
The outer limit of the Oort cloud defines the cosmographic boundary of the Solar System. This area is defined by the Sun's Hill sphere, and hence lies at the interface between solar and galactic gravitational dominion. [ 7 ] The outer Oort cloud is only loosely bound to the Solar System and its constituents are easily affected by the gravitational pulls of both passing stars and the Milky Way ...
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.
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 ...
The Andromeda–Milky Way collision is a galactic collision predicted to occur in about 4.5 billion years between the two largest galaxies in the Local Group —the Milky Way (which contains the Solar System and Earth) and the Andromeda Galaxy. [1][2][3][4][5] The stars involved are sufficiently far apart that it is improbable that any of them will individually collide, [6] though some stars ...