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Within a few billion years of the birth of the first stars, the mass of the Milky Way was large enough so that it was spinning relatively quickly. Due to conservation of angular momentum , this led the gaseous interstellar medium to collapse from a roughly spheroidal shape to a disk.
4th century BC — Aristotle believes the Milky Way to be caused by "the ignition of the fiery exhalation of some stars which were large, numerous and close together" and that the "ignition takes place in the upper part of the atmosphere, in the region of the world which is continuous with the heavenly motions".
This is considered one of the highest masses ever recorded for such an object; higher than the mass of all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy combined, which is 64 billion solar masses, [10] and 15,300 times more massive than Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way's central black hole.
Measurements with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2006 suggest the Magellanic Clouds may be moving too fast to be orbiting the Milky Way. Of the galaxies confirmed to be in orbit, the largest is the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, which has a diameter of 2.6 kiloparsecs (8,500 ly) or roughly a twentieth that of the Milky Way.
−0.45 × 10 8 (140 million) M ☉ central black hole, significantly larger than the Milky Way's. The largest supermassive black hole in the Milky Way's vicinity appears to be that of Messier 87 (i.e., M87*), at a mass of (6.5 ± 0.7) × 10 9 (c. 6.5 billion) M ☉ at a distance of 48.92 million light-years.
In the Local Group, the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are gravitationally bound, and currently approaching each other at high speed. Simulations show that the Milky Way and Andromeda are on a collision course, and are expected to collide in less than five billion years.
The Large Magellanic Cloud and its neighbour and relative, the Small Magellanic Cloud, are conspicuous objects in the southern hemisphere, looking like separated pieces of the Milky Way to the naked eye. Roughly 21 ° apart in the night sky, the true distance between them is roughly 75,000 light-years.
Based on the D 25 isophote at the B-band (445 nm wavelength of light), the Large Magellanic Cloud is about 9.86 kiloparsecs (32,200 light-years) across. It is roughly one-hundredth the mass of the Milky Way and is the fourth-largest galaxy in the Local Group, after the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the Milky Way, and the Triangulum Galaxy (M33).
A NASA conception of the collision using computer-generated imagery. The Andromeda–Milky Way collision is a galactic collision predicted to occur in about 4.5 billion years between the two largest galaxies in the Local Group —the Milky Way (which contains the Solar System and Earth) and the Andromeda Galaxy.
The Milky Way bar is made of nougat, topped with caramel and covered with milk chocolate. It was created in 1923 by Frank C. Mars and originally manufactured in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The name and taste derived from a then-popular malted milk drink ( milkshake) of the day, not after the astronomical galaxy.