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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 Galactic Center, as seen by one of the 2MASS infrared telescopes, is located in the bright upper left portion of the image. Marked location of the Galactic Center. 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 ...
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.
While Earth is located about 26,000 light-years from what's known as the galactic center, the outer portions of the Milky Way are even further, at about 58,000 light-years from our galaxy's ...
See also: Lists of nebulae. The Rosette Nebula (also known as Caldwell 49) is an H II region located near one end of a giant molecular cloud in the Monoceros region of the Milky Way Galaxy. The open cluster NGC 2244 (Caldwell 50) is closely associated with the nebulosity, the stars of the cluster having been formed from the nebula's matter.
The Milky Way has several smaller galaxies gravitationally bound to it, as part of the Milky Way subgroup, which is part of the local galaxy cluster, the Local Group. [ 1 ] There are 61 small galaxies confirmed to be within 420 kiloparsecs (1.4 million light-years ) of the Milky Way, [ 2 ] but not all of them are necessarily in orbit, and some ...
In astronomy, the Great Rift (sometimes called the Dark Rift or less commonly the Dark River) is a dark band caused by interstellar clouds of cosmic dust that significantly obscure (extinguish) the center and most radial sectors of the Milky Way galaxy from Earth 's perspective. In dark, clear night skies, the rift appears as clear as the ...
Galaxies and galaxy clusters < 50 M ly away from Earth plotted in the supergalactic plane. The supergalactic coordinate system is a reference frame for the supercluster of galaxies that contains the Milky Way galaxy, referenced to a local relatively flat collection of galaxy clusters used to define the supergalactic plane.