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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 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 ...
The Milky Way galaxy is a member of an association named the Local Group, a relatively small group of galaxies that has a diameter of approximately one megaparsec. The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are the two brightest galaxies within the group; many of the other member galaxies are dwarf companions of these two.
Schwarzschild radius. The Schwarzschild radius or the gravitational radius is a physical parameter in the Schwarzschild solution to Einstein's field equations that corresponds to the radius defining the event horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole. It is a characteristic radius associated with any quantity of mass.
Pulsar navigation. X-ray pulsar-based navigation and timing (XNAV) or simply pulsar navigation is a navigation technique whereby the periodic X-ray signals emitted from pulsars are used to determine the location of a vehicle, such as a spacecraft in deep space.
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 universe is all of space and time [a] and their contents. [10] It comprises all of existence, any fundamental interaction, physical process and physical constant, and therefore all forms of energy and matter, and the structures they form, from sub-atomic particles to entire galactic filaments. Space and time, according to the prevailing ...
The centre of the Milky Way is about 26 000 light-years away. 1 × 10 5 ly: The Milky Way is about 100 000 light-years across. 1.65 × 10 5 ly: R136a1, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the most luminous star known at 8.7 million times the luminosity of the Sun, has an apparent magnitude 12.77, just brighter than 3C 273. 10 6: 2.5 × 10 6 ly