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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 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. [269] The Sun is part of one of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms, known as the Orion–Cygnus Arm or Local Spur.
The exact number of galaxies in the Local Group is unknown as some are occluded by the Milky Way; however, at least 80 members are known, most of which are dwarf galaxies. The two largest members, the Andromeda and the Milky Way galaxies, are both spiral galaxies with masses of about 10 12 solar masses each.
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 ...
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.
There could be 300 million planets in the Milky Way Galaxy that support life, according to NASA estimates. The planets are all rocky, similar in size to Earth and orbit in the “Goldilocks zone ...
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 ...
This yields a mass-to-light ratio of about 300 times that of the solar ratio (M ☉ /L ☉ = 1), a figure that is consistent with results obtained for other superclusters. [ 13 ] [ 14 ] By comparison, the mass-to-light ratio for the Milky Way is 63.8 assuming a solar absolute magnitude of 4.83, [ 15 ] a Milky Way absolute magnitude of −20.9 ...