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The Andromeda Galaxy is approaching the Milky Way at about 110 kilometres (68 miles) per second. [134] It has been measured approaching relative to the Sun at around 300 km/s (190 mi/s) [ 1 ] as the Sun orbits around the center of the galaxy at a speed of approximately 225 km/s (140 mi/s).
To visualize that scale, if the Sun were a ping-pong ball, Proxima Centauri would be a pea about 1,100 km (680 mi) away, and the Milky Way would be about 30 million km (19 million mi) wide. Although stars are more common near the centers of each galaxy, the average distance between stars is still 160 billion (1.6 × 10 11 ) km (100 billion mi).
This is a list of known galaxies within 3.8 megaparsecs (12.4 million light-years) of the Solar System, in ascending order of heliocentric distance, or the distance to the Sun. This encompasses about 50 major Local Group galaxies, and some that are members of neighboring galaxy groups , the M81 Group and the Centaurus A/M83 Group , and some ...
The Andromeda galaxy is approximately 2.5 million light-years away from the Milky Way. ... that are brighter than Earth's sun. But astronomers estimate the total population of stars to be about 1 ...
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 general direction of the Sun's Galactic motion is towards the star Vega near the constellation of Hercules, at an angle of roughly 60 sky degrees to the direction of the Galactic Center. The Sun's orbit about the Milky Way is ...
The distance he found was far greater than the size of the Milky Way, which led him to the conclusion that many similar objects were "island universes" on their own. [60] [61] [62] Hubble originally estimated that the Andromeda Galaxy was 900,000 light-years away, but Ernst Öpik's estimate in 1925 put the distance closer to 1.5 million light ...
It had been conjectured that the fixed stars were much farther away than the planets. Sun: Star 3rd century BC — 1609 380 Earth radii (very inaccurate, true=16000 Earth radii) Aristarchus of Samos made a measurement of the distance of the Sun from the Earth in relation to the distance of the Moon from the Earth. The distance to the Moon was ...
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]