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The Milky Way is approximately 890 billion to 1.54 trillion times the mass of the Sun in total (8.9 × 10 11 to 1.54 × 10 12 solar masses), [7][8][9] although stars and planets make up only a small part of this. Estimates of the mass of the Milky Way vary, depending upon the method and data used.
Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is a large disk-shaped barred-spiral galaxy [92] about 30 kiloparsecs in diameter and a kiloparsec thick. It contains about two hundred billion (2×10 11) [93] stars and has a total mass of about six hundred billion (6×10 11) times the mass of the Sun. [94]
The observable universe contains as many as an estimated 2 trillion galaxies [36] [37] [38] and, overall, as many as an estimated 10 24 stars [39] [40] – more stars (and, potentially, Earth-like planets) than all the grains of beach sand on planet Earth. [41] [42] [43] Other estimates are in the hundreds of billions rather than trillions.
Astronomers using the Gaia space telescope have located two ancient streams of stars that helped the Milky Way galaxy grow and evolve more than 12 billion years ago.
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 center ...
Media category. Q11387. Additional Information. An open cluster is a type of star cluster made of tens to a few thousand stars that were formed from the same giant molecular cloud and have roughly the same age. More than 1,100 open clusters have been discovered within the Milky Way galaxy, and many more are thought to exist. [1]
The Andromeda Galaxy is known to harbor a dense and compact star cluster at its very center, similar to our own galaxy. A large telescope creates a visual impression of a star embedded in the more diffuse surrounding bulge. In 1991, the Hubble Space Telescope was used to image the Andromeda Galaxy's inner nucleus.
The Laniakea Supercluster encompasses approximately 100,000 galaxies stretched out over 160 Mpc (520 million ly). It has the approximate mass of 10 17 solar masses, or 100,000 times that of our galaxy, which is almost the same as that of the Horologium Supercluster. [3] It consists of four subparts, which were known previously as separate ...