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Messier 81 (also known as NGC 3031 or Bode's Galaxy) is a grand design spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It has a D 25 isophotal diameter of 29.44 kiloparsecs (96,000 light-years ).
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 M81 Group is a galaxy group in the constellations Ursa Major and Camelopardalis that includes the galaxies Messier 81 and Messier 82, as well as several other galaxies with high apparent brightnesses. [1] The approximate center of the group is located at a distance of 3.6 Mpc, making it one of the nearest groups to the Local Group. [1]
M81 is a nearly face-on spiral galaxy 11.8 million light-years from Earth. Like most spiral galaxies, it has a core made up of old stars, with arms filled with young stars and nebulae. Along with M82, it is a part of the galaxy cluster closest to the Local Group. M82 is a nearly edgewise galaxy that is interacting gravitationally with M81.
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 described in Earth radii (20, also inaccurate). The diameter of the Earth had been calculated previously.
The image shows a slight rotation in the vertical plane (the lower right moving toward earth, the upper left moving away), showing that M87 is rotating slowly. [51] [52] M87 is one of the most massive galaxies in the local Universe. Its diameter is estimated at 132,000 light-years, which is approximately 51% larger than that of the Milky Way.
Generated by the churning molten metals in Earth’s core, the magnetosphere shields the planet from harmful solar radiation and keeps solar winds from stripping away Earth’s atmosphere.
Radar is used to measure the distance between the orbits of the Earth and of a second body. From that measurement and the ratio of the two orbit sizes, the size of Earth's orbit is calculated. The Earth's orbit is known with an absolute precision of a few meters and a relative precision of a few parts in 100 billion (1 × 10 −11).