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Diagram of the Milky Way, with galactic features and the relative position of the Solar System labeled. The Solar System is located in the Milky Way, a barred spiral galaxy with a diameter of about 100,000 light-years containing more than 100 billion stars. [271]
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 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 ...
We now have the most detailed catalogue of stars in our Milky Way galaxy yet. The new map — created using data collected by the Gaia satellite — shows about 1.7 billion stars, including many ...
Orion Arm. The Orion Arm, also known as the Orion–Cygnus Arm, is a minor spiral arm within the Milky Way Galaxy spanning 3,500 light-years (1,100 parsecs) in width and extending roughly 20,000 light-years (6,100 parsecs) in length. [2] This galactic structure encompasses the Solar System, including Earth.
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 Laniakea Supercluster encompasses approximately 100,000 galaxies stretched out over 160 Mpc (520 million ly). It has the approximate mass of 10 17 solar masses, or 100,000 times that of our galaxy, which is almost the same as that of the Horologium Supercluster. [3] It consists of four subparts, which were known previously as separate ...
The find, announced Wednesday, can help explain how solar systems across the Milky Way galaxy came to be. This one is 100 light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. A light-year is 5.8 ...