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Milky Way: Many European languages have borrowed, directly or indirectly, the Greek name for the Milky Way, including English and Latin. Road to Santiago: the Milky Way was traditionally used as a guide by pilgrims traveling to the holy site at Compostela, hence the use of "The Road to Santiago" as a name for the Milky Way. [58]
center – the study of the central region of the Milky Way; disk – the study of the Milky Way disk (the plane upon which most galactic objects are aligned) evolution – the evolution of the Milky Way; formation – the formation of the Milky Way; fundamental parameters – the fundamental parameters of the Milky Way (mass, size etc.)
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.
Later in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble showed that Andromeda was far outside the Milky Way by measuring Cepheid variable stars, proving that Curtis was correct. [6] It is now known that the Milky Way is only one of as many as an estimated 200 billion (2 × 10 11) [7] to 2 trillion (2 × 10 12) or more galaxies in the observable Universe.
Figure 1.The observed structure of the Milky Way's spiral arms [1]. 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]
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]
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]
Galactic Tick Day is an awareness and education day that celebrates the movement of the Solar System around the Milky Way galaxy. [1] [2] [3] [4]The day occurs at a regular interval of 1.7361 years (or 633.7 days), [5] which is called a galactic tick.