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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.
Hubble sequence. The Hubble sequence is a morphological classification scheme for galaxies published by Edwin Hubble in 1926. [1][2][3][4] It is often colloquially known as the Hubble tuning-fork diagram because the shape in which it is traditionally represented resembles a tuning fork. It was invented by John Henry Reynolds and Sir James Jeans.
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. [35] [36] Their suspicions were confirmed by Spitzer Space Telescope observations in 2005, [37] which showed that the Milky Way's central bar is larger than what was previously suspected.
The rotation curve of a disc galaxy (also called a velocity curve) is a plot of the orbital speeds of visible stars or gas in that galaxy versus their radial distance from that galaxy's centre. It is typically rendered graphically as a plot, and the data observed from each side of a spiral galaxy are generally asymmetric, so that data from each ...
The Galactic Center, as seen by one of the 2MASS infrared telescopes, is located in the bright upper left portion of the image. Marked location of the Galactic Center. 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 ...
A barred spiral galaxy is a spiral galaxy with a central bar-shaped structure composed of stars. [1] Bars are found in about two thirds of all spiral galaxies in the local universe, [2] and generally affect both the motions of stars and interstellar gas within spiral galaxies and can affect spiral arms as well. [3][4] The Milky Way Galaxy ...
A galactic disc (or galactic disk) is a component of disc galaxies, such as spiral galaxies like the Milky Way and lenticular galaxies. Galactic discs consist of a stellar component (composed of most of the galaxy's stars) and a gaseous component (mostly composed of cool gas and dust). The stellar population of galactic discs tend to exhibit ...
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 stars.