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Theoretical models had predicted that the old stars—which far outnumber young stars—should have a steeply-rising density near the black hole, a so-called Bahcall–Wolf cusp. Instead, it was discovered in 2009 that the density of the old stars peaks at a distance of roughly 0.5 parsec from Sgr A*, then falls inward: instead of a dense ...
The list aims to reflect current knowledge: not all galaxies within the 3.8 Mpc radius have been discovered. Nearby dwarf galaxies are still being discovered, and galaxies located behind the central plane of the Milky Way are extremely difficult to discern. It is possible for any galaxy to mask another located beyond it.
The galactic plane is the plane on which the majority of a disk-shaped galaxy's mass lies. The directions perpendicular to the galactic plane point to the galactic poles . In actual usage, the terms galactic plane and galactic poles usually refer specifically to the plane and poles of the Milky Way , in which Planet Earth is located.
This article documents the most distant astronomical objects discovered and verified so far, and the time periods in which they were so classified. For comparisons with the light travel distance of the astronomical objects listed below, the age of the universe since the Big Bang is currently estimated as 13.787±0.020 Gyr.
This illustrates the fact that there are far more faint stars than bright stars: in the entire sky, there are about 500 stars brighter than apparent magnitude 4 but 15.5 million stars brighter than apparent magnitude 14. [108] 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 actual distance to the border of this cavity varies from 60 to 250 pc or more. This volume contains about 10 4 –10 5 stars and the local interstellar gas counterbalances the astrospheres that surround these stars, with the volume of each sphere varying depending on the local density of the interstellar medium. The Local Bubble contains ...
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The thin disk contributes about 85% of the stars in the Galactic plane [3] and 95% of the total disk stars. [2] It can be set apart from the thick disk of a galaxy since the latter is composed of older population stars created at an earlier stage of the galaxy formation and thus has fewer heavy elements. Stars in the thin disk, on the other ...