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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 Andromeda Galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy and is the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way. It was originally named the Andromeda Nebula and is cataloged as Messier 31 , M31 , and NGC 224 . Andromeda has a D 25 isophotal diameter of about 46.56 kiloparsecs (152,000 light-years ) [8] and is approximately 765 kpc (2.5 million light-years ...
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.
The best time to see the Milky Way is up to a week before and within days after a new moon to avoid excess light in the night sky. Through the remainder of this summer into early fall, a new moon ...
Sagittarius A*, abbreviated as Sgr A* ( / ˈsædʒ ˈeɪ stɑːr / SADGE-AY-star [3] ), is the supermassive black hole [4] [5] [6] at the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. Viewed from Earth, it is located near the border of the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius, about 5.6° south of the ecliptic, [7] visually close to the Butterfly ...
List of nearest galaxies. Appearance. This is a list of known galaxies within 3.8 megaparsecs (12.4 million light-years) of the Solar System, in ascending order of heliocentric distance, or the distance to the Sun. This encompasses about 50 major Local Group galaxies, and some that are members of neighboring galaxy groups, the M81 Group and the ...
Additionally, astronomers have found 6 white dwarfs (stars that have exhausted all fusible hydrogen), 21 brown dwarfs, as well as 1 sub-brown dwarf, WISE 0855−0714 (possibly a rogue planet ). The closest system is Alpha Centauri, with Proxima Centauri as the closest star in that system, at 4.2465 light-years from Earth.
Gaia BH1 is 1,560 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus. For comparison, the nearest star to the Sun (Proxima Centauri) is about 4.24 light years away, and the Milky Way galaxy is approximately 100,000 light years in diameter.