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The Orion Arm, also known as the Orion–Cygnus Arm, is a minor spiral arm within the Milky Way Galaxy spanning 3,500 light-years (1,100 parsecs) in width and extending roughly 20,000 light-years (6,100 parsecs) in length. [2] This galactic structure encompasses the Solar System, including Earth.
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 Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with two major arms and a number of minor arms or spurs. [1] The Perseus Spiral Arm, with a radius of approximately 10.7 kiloparsecs, is located between the minor Cygnus and Carina–Sagittarius Arms. [1] It is named after the Perseus constellation in the direction of which it is seen from Earth.
As the Earth is located within the dusty outer arms, there are large portions of the Milky Way that are obscured from view. [66]: 837–842, 944 In the center of the Milky Way is the core, a bar-shaped bulge with what is believed to be a supermassive black hole at its center. This is surrounded by four primary arms that spiral from the core.
Astronomers on Wednesday announced that they have detected a strong and organized magnetic field twisted in a spiral pattern around the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, revealing previously ...
The Milky Way Galaxy has a diameter of 100,000–200,000 light-years and is estimated to contain 100–400 billion stars and at least that number of planets. The Solar System is located on the inner edge of one of the Milky Way's spiral arms, about 27,000 light-years from the Galactic Center, which the Sun orbits with a period of 240 million ...
The stars in our galaxy’s heart are metal-poor, so we dubbed this region the Milky Way’s ‘poor old heart,’” said Rix, director of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy’s department of ...
It is named for the Norma constellation, through which the Arm as seen from Earth passes. Like many other galaxies of similar type, the Milky Way consists of a large mass of stars shaped into the form of a relatively flat disc by gravity. The disc is rotating, with the dense central body of stars moving at greater speeds than those toward the ...