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If Jupiter had Mercury's orbit (57,900,000 km, 0.387 AU), the Sun–Jupiter barycenter would be approximately 55,000 km from the center of the Sun ( r 1 / R 1 ≈ 0.08). But even if the Earth had Eris's orbit (1.02 × 10 10 km, 68 AU), the Sun–Earth barycenter would still be within the Sun (just over 30,000 km from the center).
The mass of the observable universe is often quoted as 10 53 kg. [48] In this context, mass refers to ordinary (baryonic) matter and includes the interstellar medium (ISM) and the intergalactic medium (IGM). However, it excludes dark matter and dark energy. This quoted value for the mass of ordinary matter in the universe can be estimated based ...
Historically, different people have suggested various locations as the center of the Universe. Many mythological cosmologies included an axis mundi, the central axis of a flat Earth that connects the Earth, heavens, and other realms together. In the 4th century BC Greece, philosophers developed the geocentric model, based on astronomical ...
Although the distance traveled by light from the edge of the observable universe is close to the age of the universe times the speed of light, 13.8 billion light-years (4.2 × 10 ^ 9 pc), the proper distance is larger because the edge of the observable universe and the Earth have since moved further apart.
Knowledge of the location of Earth has been shaped by 400 years of telescopic observations, and has expanded radically since the start of the 20th century. Initially, Earth was believed to be the center of the Universe, which consisted only of those planets visible with the naked eye and an outlying sphere of fixed stars. [1]
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany using Chilean telescopes have confirmed the existence of a supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center, on the order of 4.3 million solar masses. [5] Later studies have estimated a mass of 3.7 million [34] [35] or 4.1 million solar masses. [24]
After Shapley and Hubble showed that the Sun is not the center of the universe, cosmology moved on from heliocentrism to galactocentrism, which states that the Milky Way is the center of the universe. [156] Hubble's observations of redshift in light from distant galaxies indicated that the universe was expanding and acentric. [158]
The fundamental plane is the plane of the Earth's orbit, called the ecliptic plane. There are two principal variants of the ecliptic coordinate system: geocentric ecliptic coordinates centered on the Earth and heliocentric ecliptic coordinates centered on the center of mass of the Solar System.