Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with a hazy band of light seen in the night sky. It is a barred spiral galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center, and contains 100–400 billion stars and planets.
The galactic coordinate system is a celestial coordinate system with the Sun as its center, the primary direction aligned with the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, and the fundamental plane parallel to an approximation of the galactic plane but offset to its north. It is used to locate objects in the sky with respect to the galaxy, and it is different from the supergalactic coordinate system ...
The galactic plane is the plane on which the majority of a disk-shaped galaxy's mass lies. Learn about the definition, position and examples of the galactic plane of the Milky Way and other galaxies.
Hypervelocity stars are stars that escape from the Milky Way due to gravitational encounters with the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center. Stellar kinematics is the observational study of the motions of stars and galaxies, and can identify these exotic phenomena.
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 ...
Learn about different coordinate systems used in astronomy to specify positions of celestial objects relative to various reference frames. The equatorial system is based on Earth's equator and the celestial poles, and is the normal coordinate system for most star maps.
The Galactic Center is the barycenter of the Milky Way and a corresponding point on the rotational axis of the galaxy. It contains a supermassive black hole of about 4 million solar masses, called Sagittarius A*, which is a compact radio source near the galactic rotational center.
Learn about the reference frame for the supercluster of galaxies that contains the Milky Way, based on a local flat collection of galaxy clusters. Find out the history, definition, and transformation of the supergalactic coordinate system, and see examples of nearby galaxies plotted in the supergalactic plane.