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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. The Sun is part of one of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms, known as the Orion–Cygnus Arm or Local Spur.
History of observations. The first known globular cluster, now called M 22, was discovered in 1665 by Abraham Ihle, a German amateur astronomer. The cluster Omega Centauri, easily visible in the southern sky with the naked eye, was known to ancient astronomers like Ptolemy as a star, but was reclassified as a nebula by Edmond Halley in 1677, then finally as a globular cluster in the early 19th ...
The halo stars of the Milky Way have an observed radial velocity dispersion of about 200 km/s and a low average velocity of rotation of about 50 km/s. Star formation in the stellar halo of the Milky Way ceased long ago. Galactic corona. A galactic corona is a distribution of gas extending far away from the center of the galaxy.
The study of galaxy formation and evolution is concerned with the processes that formed a heterogeneous universe from a homogeneous beginning, the formation of the first galaxies, the way galaxies change over time, and the processes that have generated the variety of structures observed in nearby galaxies. Galaxy formation is hypothesized to ...
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 ), [2] [8] [9] [10] 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 ...
Light observed from this 800-million-solar-mass quasar was emitted when the universe was only 690 million years old. ... including the Milky Way galaxy, ...
The stars in our galaxy’s heart are metal-poor, so we dubbed this region the Milky Way’s ‘poor old heart,’” said Rix, director of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy’s department of ...
Galactic year. The galactic year, also known as a cosmic year, is the duration of time required for the Sun to orbit once around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. [1] One galactic year is approximately 225 million Earth years. [2] The Solar System is traveling at an average speed of 230 km/s (828,000 km/h) or 143 mi/s (514,000 mph) within its ...