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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.
The galactic coordinate system is a celestial coordinate system in spherical coordinates, with the Sun as its center, the primary direction aligned with the approximate center of the Milky Way Galaxy, and the fundamental plane parallel to an approximation of the galactic plane but offset to its north.
Usually the Sun (or Moon for nocturnal species) is the only light source and flying that way will result in a practically straight line. The arms of spiral galaxies. The Milky Way galaxy has several spiral arms, each of which is roughly a logarithmic spiral with pitch of about 12 degrees.
The Drake equation is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Milky Way: 1.6 × 10 42 kg: 2.4 × 10 15 m (0.25 ly) 5 × 10 20 m (52 900 ly) 0.000 029 kg/m 3: SMBH in Phoenix A (one of the largest known black holes) 2 × 10 41 kg: 3 × 10 14 m (~2000 AU) 0.0018 kg/m 3: Ton 618: 1.3 × 10 41 kg: 1.9 × 10 14 m (~1300 AU) 0.0045 kg/m 3: SMBH in NGC 4889: 4.2 × 10 40 kg: 6.2 × 10 13 m (~410 AU) 0.042 kg/m 3 ...
The parsec (symbol: pc) is a unit of length used to measure the large distances to astronomical objects outside the Solar System, approximately equal to 3.26 light-years or 206,265 astronomical units (AU), i.e. 30.9 trillion kilometres (19.2 trillion miles ). [a] The parsec unit is obtained by the use of parallax and trigonometry, and is ...
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.
The astronomical unit (symbol: au, or AU) is a unit of length defined to be exactly equal to 149,597,870,700 m. Historically, the astronomical unit was conceived as the average Earth-Sun distance (the average of Earth's aphelion and perihelion), before its modern redefinition in 2012.
For objects within the Milky Way with a given absolute magnitude, 5 is added to the apparent magnitude for every tenfold increase in the distance to the object. For objects at very great distances (far beyond the Milky Way), this relationship must be adjusted for redshifts and for non-Euclidean distance measures due to general relativity .
Galactic astronomy is the study of the Milky Way galaxy and all its contents. This is in contrast to extragalactic astronomy, which is the study of everything outside our galaxy, including all other galaxies.