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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 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]
The name describes the galaxy's appearance from the Earth: a hazy band of light visible in the night sky, formed from billions of stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. 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 ...
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This is in contrast to extragalactic astronomy, which is the study of everything outside our galaxy, including all other galaxies. Galactic astronomy should not be confused with galaxy formation and evolution , which is the general study of galaxies , their formation, structure, components, dynamics, interactions, and the range of forms they take.
Size (left) and distance (right) of a few well-known galaxies put to scale. The following is a list of notable galaxies.. There are about 51 galaxies in the Local Group (see list of nearest galaxies for a complete list), on the order of 100,000 in the Local Supercluster, and an estimated 100 billion in all of the observable universe.
Galaxies and galaxy clusters < 50 M ly away from Earth plotted in the supergalactic plane. The supergalactic coordinate system is a reference frame for the supercluster of galaxies that contains the Milky Way galaxy, referenced to a local relatively flat collection of galaxy clusters used to define the supergalactic plane.
SMACS J0723.3–7327, commonly referred to as SMACS 0723, is a galaxy cluster about 4 billion light years from Earth, [2] within the southern constellation of Volans (RA/Dec = 110.8375, −73.4391667).