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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 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 traces out a sinusoidal path in its orbit around the galactic center. Using Galactic North as the initial frame of reference, the Earth and Sun rotate counterclockwise, and the Earth revolves in a counterclockwise direction around the Sun. However, the Sun and its satellites revolve CLOCKWISE around the Milky Way.
Captured in unprecedented detail, the image of the nebula focuses on a portion of the horse’s “mane” that is about 0.8 light-years in width and roughly 1,300 light-years away from Earth.
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]
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.
Cygnus is a northern constellation on the plane of the Milky Way, deriving its name from the Latinized Greek word for swan. [1] Cygnus is one of the most recognizable constellations of the northern summer and autumn, and it features a prominent asterism known as the Northern Cross (in contrast to the Southern Cross).
Measurements with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2006 suggest the Magellanic Clouds may be moving too fast to be orbiting the Milky Way. [3] Of the galaxies confirmed to be in orbit, the largest is the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy, which has a diameter of 2.6 kiloparsecs (8,500 ly) [4] or roughly a twentieth that of the Milky Way.