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According to recent studies, the Milky Way as well as the Andromeda Galaxy lie in what in the galaxy color–magnitude diagram is known as the "green valley", a region populated by galaxies in transition from the "blue cloud" (galaxies actively forming new stars) to the "red sequence" (galaxies that lack star formation). Star-formation activity ...
The Milky Way has several smaller galaxies gravitationally bound to it, as part of the Milky Way subgroup, which is part of the local galaxy cluster, the Local Group.. 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.
Diagram of the Milky Way, with galactic features and the relative position of the Solar System labelled. 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. [268]
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a dwarf galaxy and satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. At a distance of around 50 kiloparsecs (163,000 light-years), the LMC is the second- or third-closest galaxy to the Milky Way, after the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal (c. 16 kiloparsecs (52,000 light-years) away) and the possible dwarf irregular galaxy called the Canis Major Overdensity.
There have been detailed maps of the Milky Way before, but none quite so ornate as this. Researchers in the HI4PI sky survey have created a fine-grained map of our home galaxy using its most ...
Astronomers have released an image of the Milky Way that maps some of the largest structures in the galaxy, including nebulas and the galactic center.
On the right of the Hubble sequence diagram are two parallel branches encompassing the spiral galaxies. A spiral galaxy consists of a flattened disk, with stars forming a (usually two-armed) spiral structure, and a central concentration of stars known as the bulge. Roughly half of all spirals are also observed to have a bar-like structure, with ...
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.