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The word galaxy was borrowed via French and Medieval Latin from the Greek term for the Milky Way, galaxías (kúklos) γαλαξίας (κύκλος) [15] [16] 'milky (circle)', named after its appearance as a milky band of light in the sky.
In practice forms ending in -ean may be pronounced as if they were spelled -ian even if the e is long in Latin. This dichotomy should be familiar from the dual pronunciations of Caribbean as / ˌ k ær ɪ ˈ b iː ə n / KARR -ə- BEE -ən and / k ə ˈ r ɪ b i ə n / kə- RIB -i-ən .
There are a few exceptions such as the Andromeda Galaxy, the Whirlpool Galaxy, and others, but most simply have a catalog number. In the 19th century, the exact nature of galaxies was not yet understood, and the early catalogs simply grouped together open clusters, globular clusters, nebulas, and galaxies: the Messier catalog has 110 in total.
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.
In 2016, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) organized a Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) [2] to catalog and standardize proper names for stars. The WGSN's first bulletin, dated July 2016, [3] 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 ...
Galaxy (aka HIPASS J1131-31) was hidden behind a relatively fast-moving foreground star (TYC 7215-199-1) and became observable when the star moved aside. [citation needed] Galaxy, relatively nearby, is considered one of the most metal-poor ("extremely metal-poor" (XMP)), least chemically enriched, and seemingly primordial, galaxies known. [10] [11]
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It introduced a system of designating the brightest stars in each constellation by means of Greek (or less often Latin) letters, and is still widely used. Bayer generally assigned letters by magnitude class: 1st magnitude stars received the earliest letters in the alphabet, followed by 2nd magnitude stars, and so forth (though there are many ...