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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 Sun is part of one of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms, known as the Orion–Cygnus Arm or Local Spur. [270] [271] It is a member of the thin disk population of stars orbiting close to the galactic plane. [272] Its speed around the center of the Milky Way is about 220 km/s, so that it completes one revolution every 240 million years. [269]
The find, announced Wednesday, can help explain how solar systems across the Milky Way galaxy came to be. This one is 100 light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. A light-year is 5.8 ...
The Galactic Center is the barycenter of the Milky Way and a corresponding point on the rotational axis of the galaxy. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Its central massive object is a supermassive black hole of about 4 million solar masses , which is called Sagittarius A* , [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] a compact radio source which is almost exactly at the galactic rotational ...
While Earth is located about 26,000 light-years from what's known as the galactic center, the outer portions of the Milky Way are even further, at about 58,000 light-years from our galaxy's ...
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]
There could be 300 million planets in the Milky Way Galaxy that support life, according to NASA estimates. The planets are all rocky, similar in size to Earth and orbit in the “Goldilocks zone ...
The galactic plane is the plane on which the majority of a disk-shaped galaxy's mass lies. The directions perpendicular to the galactic plane point to the galactic poles. In actual usage, the terms galactic plane and galactic poles usually refer specifically to the plane and poles of the Milky Way, in which Planet Earth is located.