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To visualize that scale, if the Sun were a ping-pong ball, Proxima Centauri would be a pea about 1,100 km (680 mi) away, and the Milky Way would be about 30 million km (19 million mi) wide. Although stars are more common near the centers of each galaxy, the average distance between stars is still 160 billion (1.6 × 10 11 ) km (100 billion mi).
The Andromeda Galaxy is approaching the Milky Way at about 110 kilometres (68 miles) per second. [134] It has been measured approaching relative to the Sun at around 300 km/s (190 mi/s) [ 1 ] as the Sun orbits around the center of the galaxy at a speed of approximately 225 km/s (140 mi/s).
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 apex of the Sun's way, or the solar apex, is the direction that the Sun travels through space in the Milky Way. The general direction of the Sun's Galactic motion is towards the star Vega near the constellation of Hercules, at an angle of roughly 60 sky degrees to the direction of the Galactic Center. The Sun's orbit about the Milky Way is ...
English: This image shows the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies in space to scale. It illustrates both the size of each galaxy and the distance between the two galaxies, to create a better understanding of relative sizes and distances.
The distance he found was far greater than the size of the Milky Way, which led him to the conclusion that many similar objects were "island universes" on their own. [61] [62] [63] Hubble originally estimated that the Andromeda Galaxy was 900,000 light-years away, but Ernst Öpik's estimate in 1925 put the distance closer to 1.5 million light ...
The location of the Great Attractor was finally determined in 1986: It is situated at a distance of somewhere between 150 and 250 Mly (million light-years) (47–79 Mpc), the larger being the most recent estimate, away from the Milky Way, in the direction of the constellations Triangulum Australe (The Southern Triangle) and Norma (The Carpenter ...
The term "The Local Group" was introduced by Edwin Hubble in Chapter VI of his 1936 book The Realm of the Nebulae. [11] There, he described it as "a typical small group of nebulae which is isolated in the general field" and delineated, by decreasing luminosity, its members to be M31, Milky Way, M33, Large Magellanic Cloud, Small Magellanic Cloud, M32, NGC 205, NGC 6822, NGC 185, IC 1613 and ...