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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 in other arms of the galaxy, which are so far away that they cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye.
Its distance from Earth is about 25.2 million light-years or 7.72 megaparsecs, [2] similar to the distance of M101 (NGC 5457) in the constellation Ursa Major. [5] Both were once considered to be part of the Local Group , [ 6 ] but are now known to be among the dozen bright spiral galaxies near the Milky Way but beyond the confines of the Local ...
Knowledge of the location of Earth has been shaped by 400 years of telescopic observations, and has expanded radically since the start of the 20th century. Initially, Earth was believed to be the center of the Universe , which consisted only of those planets visible with the naked eye and an outlying sphere of fixed stars . [ 1 ]
NASA recently released images of the Andromeda galaxy, an empire of stars, that is the Milky Way galaxy's closest neighbor. This photo shows the Milky Way as seen from Black Balsam, mountain range ...
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 ...
The horizontal, or altitude-azimuth, system is based on the position of the observer on Earth, which revolves around its own axis once per sidereal day (23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.091 seconds) in relation to the star background. The positioning of a celestial object by the horizontal system varies with time, but is a useful coordinate system ...
The galactic coordinates use the Sun as the origin. Galactic longitude (l) is measured with primary direction from the Sun to the center of the galaxy in the galactic plane, while the galactic latitude (b) measures the angle of the object above the galactic plane.
Based on results from the Gaia telescope's second data release from April 2018, an estimated 694 stars will approach the Solar System to less than 5 parsecs in the next 15 million years. Of these, 26 have a good probability to come within 1.0 parsec (3.3 light-years) and another 7 within 0.5 parsecs (1.6 light-years). [3]