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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.
(110–210 Earth radii) 6.36×10 6 –1.27×10 7: The space dominated by Earth's magnetic field and its magnetotail, shaped by the solar wind. [17] Earth's orbit: 299.2 million km [b] 2 AU [c] 2.99×10 8: The average diameter of the orbit of the Earth relative to the Sun. Encompasses the Sun, Mercury and Venus. [18] Inner Solar System ~6.54 AU ...
Two spiral arms, the Scutum–Centaurus arm and the Carina–Sagittarius arm, have tangent points inside the Sun's orbit about the center of the Milky Way. If these arms contain an overdensity of stars compared to the average density of stars in the Galactic disk, it would be detectable by counting the stars near the tangent point.
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This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.: You are free: to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work; to remix – to adapt the work
Perhaps the most commonly encountered rotating reference frame is the Earth. Moving objects on the surface of the Earth experience a Coriolis force, and appear to veer to the right in the northern hemisphere, and to the left in the southern.
The spiral arms were first discovered in the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51), in which Lord Rosse identified the spiral structure in 1850. [42] In 1896, the problem of twisting was formulated. If spiral arms were material entities, due to differential rotation, they would twist very rapidly to the point where they would be impossible to observe.
Ignoring the influence of other Solar System bodies, Earth's orbit, also called Earth's revolution, is an ellipse with the Earth–Sun barycenter as one focus with a current eccentricity of 0.0167. Since this value is close to zero, the center of the orbit is relatively close to the center of the Sun (relative to the size of the orbit).