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According to recent studies, the Milky Way as well as the Andromeda Galaxy lie in what in the galaxy color–magnitude diagram is known as the "green valley", a region populated by galaxies in transition from the "blue cloud" (galaxies actively forming new stars) to the "red sequence" (galaxies that lack star formation). Star-formation activity ...
A mock-up of the galaxy color–magnitude diagram with three populations: the red sequence, the blue cloud, and the green valley. The galaxy color–magnitude diagram shows the relationship between absolute magnitude (a measure of luminosity) and mass of galaxies.
The Galactic Center is the barycenter of the Milky Way and a corresponding point on the rotational axis of the galaxy. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Its central massive object is a supermassive black hole of about 4 million solar masses , which is called Sagittarius A* , [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] a compact radio source which is almost exactly at the galactic rotational ...
Panoramic image of the center of the nebula, taken by the Hubble Telescope. This view is about 2.5 light years across. The Trapezium is at center left. Interstellar clouds like the Orion Nebula are found throughout galaxies such as the Milky Way. They begin as gravitationally bound blobs of cold, neutral hydrogen, intermixed with traces of ...
The Milky Way galaxy is a member of an association named the Local Group, a relatively small group of galaxies that has a diameter of approximately one megaparsec. The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are the two brightest galaxies within the group; many of the other member galaxies are dwarf companions of these two. [176]
Originally, the term "nebula" was used to describe any diffused astronomical object, including galaxies beyond the Milky Way. The Andromeda Galaxy, for instance, was once referred to as the Andromeda Nebula (and spiral galaxies in general as "spiral nebulae") before the true nature of galaxies was confirmed in the early 20th century by Vesto ...
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 galactic latitude (b) is perpendicular to the image (i.e. coming out of the image) and also centered on the Sun. The galactic coordinate system is a celestial coordinate system in spherical coordinates , with the Sun as its center, the primary direction aligned with the approximate center of the Milky Way Galaxy , and the fundamental plane ...