Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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.
Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is a large disk-shaped barred-spiral galaxy [92] about 30 kiloparsecs in diameter and a kiloparsec thick. It contains about two hundred billion (2×10 11) [93] stars and has a total mass of about six hundred billion (6×10 11) times the mass of the Sun. [94]
Each spot is a galaxy, consisting of billions of stars. The light from the smallest, most redshifted galaxies originated nearly 13.8 billion years ago. The comoving distance from Earth to the edge of the observable universe is about 14.26 giga parsecs (46.5 billion light-years or 4.40 × 10 26 m) in any direction.
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.
The Local Group is the galaxy group that includes the Milky Way, where Earth is located. It has a total diameter of roughly 3 megaparsecs (10 million light-years; 9 × 10 19 kilometres), [1] and a total mass of the order of 2 × 10 12 solar masses (4 × 10 42 kg). [2] It consists of two collections of galaxies in a "dumbbell" shape; the Milky ...
Astronomers using the Gaia space telescope have located two ancient streams of stars that helped the Milky Way galaxy grow and evolve more than 12 billion years ago.
The Andromeda Galaxy is known to harbor a dense and compact star cluster at its very center, similar to our own galaxy. A large telescope creates a visual impression of a star embedded in the more diffuse surrounding bulge. In 1991, the Hubble Space Telescope was used to image the Andromeda Galaxy's inner nucleus.
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 ...