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The Milky Way contains at least one planet per star, resulting in 100–400 billion planets, according to a January 2013 study of the five-planet star system Kepler-32 by the Kepler space observatory. A different January 2013 analysis of Kepler data estimated that at least 17 billion Earth-sized exoplanets reside in the Milky Way.
The Sun is part of one of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms, known as the Orion–Cygnus Arm or Local Spur. 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.
The nature of the Milky Way's bar, which extends across the Galactic Center, is also actively debated, with estimates for its half-length and orientation spanning between 1–5 kpc (short or a long bar) and 10–50°.
The Milky Way and those satellite dwarf galaxies gravitationally bound to it. Examples include the Sagittarius Dwarf , the Ursa Minor Dwarf and the Canis Major Dwarf . Cited distance is the orbital diameter of the Leo T Dwarf galaxy, the most distant galaxy in the Milky Way subgroup.
They also determined the distance from Earth to the Galactic Center (the rotational center of the Milky Way), which is important in calibrating astronomical distance scales, as 8,000 ± 600 parsecs (30,000 ± 2,000 light-years).
The stars with the most confirmed planets are the Sun (the Solar System's star) and Kepler-90, with 8 confirmed planets each, followed by TRAPPIST-1 with 7 planets. The 904 multiplanetary systems are listed below according to the star's distance from Earth.
The James Webb Space Telescope has gathered data on a planet-forming - protoplanetary - disk around a newborn star called ISO-ChaI 147. Its mass is about 11% that of the sun, its diameter about 43 ...
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.
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.
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 ...