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The Milky Way 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.
Ancient Armenian mythology called the Milky Way the "Straw Thief's Way". According to legend, the god Vahagn stole some straw from the Assyrian king Barsham and brought it to Armenia during a cold winter. When he fled across the heavens, he spilled some of the straw along the way. [1]
By the 20th century, observations of spiral nebulae revealed that the Milky Way galaxy was one of billions in an expanding universe, grouped into clusters and superclusters. By the end of the 20th century, the overall structure of the visible universe was becoming clearer, with superclusters forming into a vast web of filaments and voids . [5]
The Milky Way started out small and grew in size as it merged with other galaxies, gaining stars as well as hydrogen to form more stars. Each galaxy has hydrogen gas that aids in the birth of...
The Solar System is located in the Milky Way, a barred spiral galaxy with a diameter of about 100,000 light-years containing more than 100 billion stars. The Sun is part of one of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms, known as the Orion–Cygnus Arm or Local Spur.
The Milky Way is a barred spiral, although the bar itself is difficult to observe from Earth's current position within the galactic disc. The most convincing evidence for the stars forming a bar in the Galactic Center comes from several recent surveys, including the Spitzer Space Telescope .
The Milky Way is estimated to contain 100–400 billion stars and more than 100 billion planets. There are at least 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe . [14] [15] HD1 is the most distant known object from Earth, reported as 33.4 billion light-years away.
Our own Milky Way is generally classed as Sc or SBc, making it a barred spiral with well-defined arms. Examples of regular spiral galaxies: M31 (Andromeda Galaxy), M74, M81, M104 (Sombrero Galaxy), M51a (Whirlpool Galaxy), NGC 300, NGC 772. Examples of barred spiral galaxies: M91, M95, NGC 1097, NGC 1300, NGC1672, NGC 2536, NGC 2903.
There are 61 small galaxies confirmed to be within 420 kiloparsecs (1.4 million light-years) of the Milky Way, but not all of them are necessarily in orbit, and some may themselves be in orbit of other satellite galaxies.
Outside the heliosphere, this solar plasma gives way to the interstellar plasma permeating the Milky Way. As part of the interplanetary magnetic field, the heliosphere shields the Solar System from significant amounts of cosmic ionizing radiation; uncharged gamma rays are, however, not affected.