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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 closest encounter to the Sun so far predicted is the low-mass orange dwarf star Gliese 710 / HIP 89825 with roughly 60% the mass of the Sun. It is currently predicted to pass 0.1696 ± 0.0065 ly (10 635 ± 500 au) from the Sun in 1.290 ± 0.04 million years from the present, close enough to significantly disturb the Solar System's Oort cloud.
720,000 km/h (450,000 mi/h) [10] Orbital period. ~230 million years [10] The Solar System [d] is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it. [11] It was formed about 4.6 billion years ago when a dense region of a molecular cloud collapsed, forming the Sun and a protoplanetary disc.
The galactic coordinate system uses the approximate plane of the Milky Way Galaxy as its fundamental plane. The Solar System is still the center of the coordinate system, and the zero point is defined as the direction towards the Galactic Center. Galactic latitude resembles the elevation above the galactic plane and galactic longitude ...
The habitable zone of Gliese 581 compared with the Solar System's habitable zone. The 2007 discovery of Gliese 581c, the first super-Earth in the circumstellar habitable zone, created significant interest in the system by the scientific community, although the planet was later found to have extreme surface conditions that may resemble Venus.
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 220–250 million years. Since its formation, the ...
In astronomy, galactocentrism is the theory that the Milky Way Galaxy, home of Earth ' s Solar System, is at or near the center of the Universe. Thomas Wright and Immanuel Kant first speculated that fuzzy patches of light called nebulae were actually distant "island universes" consisting of many stellar systems.
Sun. The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light and infrared radiation with 10% at ultraviolet energies.