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In Western culture, the name "Milky Way" is derived from its appearance as a dim un-resolved "milky" glowing band arching across the night sky. The term is a translation of the Classical Latin via lactea, in turn derived from the Hellenistic Greek γαλαξίας, short for γαλαξίας κύκλος (galaxías kýklos), meaning "milky circle".
In 2016, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) organized a Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) to catalog and standardize proper names for stars. The WGSN's first bulletin, dated July 2016, included a table of 125 stars comprising the first two batches of names approved by the WGSN (on 30 June and 20 July 2016) together with names of stars adopted by the IAU Executive Committee Working ...
Below are lists of the largest stars currently known, ordered by radius and separated into categories by galaxy. The unit of measurement used is the radius of the Sun (approximately 695,700 km; 432,300 mi ). [1] The Sun, the orbit of Earth, Jupiter, and Neptune, compared to four stars. ( Pistol Star, Rho Cassiopeiae, Betelgeuse, and VY Canis ...
Messier object. The Messier objects are a set of 110 astronomical objects catalogued by the French astronomer Charles Messier in his Catalogue des Nébuleuses et des Amas d'Étoiles ( Catalogue of Nebulae and Star Clusters ). Because Messier was interested only in finding comets, he created a list of those non-comet objects that frustrated his ...
Gaia Sky is an open-source astronomy visualisation desktop and VR program with versions for Windows, Linux and macOS.It is created and developed by Toni Sagristà Sellés in the framework of ESA's Gaia mission to create a billion-star multi-dimensional map of our Milky Way Galaxy, in the Gaia group of the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut (ZAH, Universität Heidelberg).
It contains Ursa Major and the Hyades star cluster, among others. The Local Bubble also contains the neighboring G-Cloud, which contains the stars Alpha Centauri and Altair. In the galactic context, the Local Bubble is a small part of the Orion Arm, which contains most stars that we can see without a telescope.
Stellar classification. In astronomy, stellar classification is the classification of stars based on their spectral characteristics. Electromagnetic radiation from the star is analyzed by splitting it with a prism or diffraction grating into a spectrum exhibiting the rainbow of colors interspersed with spectral lines.
These are globular clusters within the halo of the Milky Way galaxy. The diameter is in minutes of arc as seen from Earth. For reference, the J2000 epoch celestial coordinates of the Galactic Center are right ascension 17h 45m 40.04s, declination −29° 00′ 28.1″. A high proportion of globular clusters are located in the Ophiuchus and ...