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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.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Solar System: Solar System – gravitationally bound system comprising the Sun and the objects that orbit it, either directly or indirectly. Of those objects that orbit the Sun directly, the largest eight are the planets (including Earth), with the remainder being ...
Radcliffe wave. The approximate outline of the Radcliffe wave in Earth's night sky. The Radcliffe wave is a neighbouring coherent gaseous structure in the Milky Way, dotted with a related high concentration of interconnected stellar nurseries. It stretches about 8,800 light years. [1][2] This structure runs with the trajectory of the Milky Way ...
The European Space Agency launched the Gaia satellite and its one-billion-pixel camera to space back in 2013. Gaia has been mapping the Milky Way ever since, and now the ESA has released a 3D map ...
The motion of nearly 1.3 billion stars has been recorded as well as the location and brightness of 1.7 billion. ... visualizations of what the Milky Way looks like. The image you see above ( full ...
At first, it looks like a planet: dark, snow-speckled and slashed down the center by a deep red scar. But zoom in a little closer, and you realize you're looking at something much larger than a ...
The Sun is part of one of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms, known as the Orion–Cygnus Arm or Local Spur. [272] [273] It is a member of the thin disk population of stars orbiting close to the galactic plane. [274] Its speed around the center of the Milky Way is about 220 km/s, so that it completes one revolution every 240 million years. [271]
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 hole of about 4 million solar masses, which is called Sagittarius A*, [3][4][5] a compact radio source which is almost exactly at the galactic rotational center ...