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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 that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye.
Orion Arm. The Orion Arm, also known as the Orion–Cygnus Arm, is a minor spiral arm within the Milky Way Galaxy spanning 3,500 light-years (1,100 parsecs) in width and extending roughly 10,000 light-years (3,100 parsecs) in length. [2] This galactic structure encompasses the Solar System, including Earth.
To the Māori the Milky Way is the waka (canoe) of Tama-rereti. The front and back of the canoe are Orion and Scorpius, while the Southern Cross and the Pointers are the anchor and rope. According to legend, when Tama-rereti took his canoe out onto a lake, he found himself far from home as night was falling.
Its speed around the center of the Milky Way is about 220 km/s, so that it completes one revolution every 240 million years. This revolution is known as the Solar System's galactic year . [262] The solar apex , the direction of the Sun's path through interstellar space, is near the constellation Hercules in the direction of the current location ...
Edwin Hubble was born to Virginia Lee Hubble (née James) (1864–1934) [14] and John Powell Hubble, an insurance executive, in Marshfield, Missouri, and moved to Wheaton, Illinois, in 1900. [15] In his younger days, he was noted more for his athletic prowess than his intellectual abilities, although he did earn good grades in every subject ...
Night on the Galactic Railroad (銀河鉄道の夜, Ginga Tetsudō no Yoru), sometimes translated as Milky Way Railroad, Night Train to the Stars or Fantasy Railroad in the Stars, [1] is a classic Japanese fantasy novel by Kenji Miyazawa written around 1927. The nine-chapter novel was posthumously published by Bunpodō (文圃堂) in 1934 as ...
The Milky Way was once considered an ordinary spiral galaxy. Astronomers first began to suspect that the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy in the 1960s. Their suspicions were confirmed by Spitzer Space Telescope observations in 2005, which showed that the Milky Way's central bar is larger than what was previously suspected. Famous examples
The Solar System travels alone through the Milky Way in a circular orbit approximately 30,000 light years from the Galactic Center. Its speed is about 220 km/s. Its speed is about 220 km/s. The period required for the Solar System to complete one revolution around the Galactic Center, the galactic year , is in the range of 220–250 million years.
Galileo made studies of sunspots, the Milky Way, and made various observations about stars, including how to measure their apparent size without a telescope. [78] [79] [80] He coined the term Aurora Borealis in 1619 from the Roman goddess of the dawn and the Greek name for the north wind, to describe lights in the northern and southern sky when ...
The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star that makes up about 99.86% of the mass of the Solar System. It has an absolute magnitude of +4.83, estimated to be brighter than about 85% of the stars in the Milky Way, most of which are red dwarfs. [32] [33] The Sun is a Population I, or heavy-element-rich, [b] star. [34]