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The Horsehead Nebula (also known as Barnard 33 or B33) is a small dark nebula in the constellation Orion. [2] The nebula is located just to the south of Alnitak, the easternmost star of Orion's Belt, and is part of the much larger Orion molecular cloud complex.
The Dark Horse Nebula or Great Dark Horse (sometimes called the Prancing Horse) is a large dark nebula that, from Earth's perspective, obscures part of the upper central bulge of the Milky Way. The Dark Horse lies in the equatorial constellation Ophiuchus (the Serpent Bearer), near its borders with the more famous constellations Scorpius and ...
The apex of the Sun's way, or the solar apex, is the direction that the Sun travels through space in the Milky Way. The general direction of the Sun's Galactic motion is towards the star Vega near the constellation of Hercules , at an angle of roughly 60 sky degrees to the direction of the Galactic Center.
[18] [19] This is about ten times the rate observed in our Milky Way galaxy, [20] even though the Milky Way has twice as many stars as NGC 6946. On 27 September 2004, the Type II supernova SN 2004et was observed at magnitude 15.2 and rose to a maximum visual magnitude of 12.7.
The nature of the Milky Way's bar, which extends across the Galactic Center, is also actively debated, with estimates for its half-length and orientation spanning between 1–5 kpc (short or a long bar) and 10–50°. [23] [25] [27] Certain authors advocate that the Milky Way features two distinct bars, one nestled within the other. [28]
Lomberg's Milky Way portrait as background for Kepler Mission diagram. The Smithsonian Institution commissioned Lomberg in the early 1990s to paint "A Portrait of the Milky Way" , a scientifically accurate artistic representation of the Milky Way galaxy as seen by a hypothetical observer from a vantage point 10 degrees above the galactic plane ...
The Milky Way was once considered an ordinary spiral galaxy. Astronomers first began to suspect that the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy in the 1960s. [38] [39] Their suspicions were confirmed by Spitzer Space Telescope observations in 2005, [40] which showed that the Milky Way's central bar is larger than what was previously suspected.
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST or Hubble) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. It was not the first space telescope, but it is one of the largest and most versatile, renowned as a vital research tool and as a public relations boon for astronomy.