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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.
The Milky Way is approximately 890 billion to 1.54 trillion times the mass of the Sun in total (8.9 × 10 11 to 1.54 × 10 12 solar masses), [ 7][ 8][ 9] although stars and planets make up only a small part of this. Estimates of the mass of the Milky Way vary, depending upon the method and data used.
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 ...
A new, incredibly detailed 3D map of the Milky Way has revealed that its central disk is wavy, much like an enormous potato chip.This new picture of the galactic disk — the central region of the ...
The Magellanic Clouds ( Magellanic system[ 2][ 3] or Nubeculae Magellani[ 4]) are two irregular dwarf galaxies in the southern celestial hemisphere. Orbiting the Milky Way galaxy, these satellite galaxies are members of the Local Group. Because both show signs of a bar structure, they are often reclassified as Magellanic spiral galaxies.
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 stars in our galaxy’s heart are metal-poor, so we dubbed this region the Milky Way’s ‘poor old heart,’” said Rix, director of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy’s department of ...
Galactic Center. 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 ...