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Maps of artificial night sky brightness show that more than one-third of Earth's population cannot see the Milky Way from their homes due to light pollution. As viewed from Earth, the visible region of the Milky Way's galactic plane occupies an area of the sky that includes 30 constellations.
Milky Way Galaxy: 30,000 pc 9.26×10 17: 17.97: Our home galaxy, composed of 200 billion to 400 billion stars and filled with the interstellar medium. Milky Way subgroup: 840,500 pc 2.59×10 19: 19.41: The Milky Way and those satellite dwarf galaxies gravitationally bound to it.
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.
Within a given supercluster, most galaxy motions will be directed inward, toward the center of mass. This gravitational focal point, in the case of Laniakea, is called the Great Attractor , and influences the motions of the Local Group of galaxies, where the Milky Way galaxy resides, and all others throughout the supercluster.
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.
17 45 40.04, −29° 00′ 28.1″. The Galactic Center, as seen by one of the 2MASS infrared telescopes, is located in the bright upper left portion of the image. Marked location of the Galactic Center. The Galactic Center is the barycenter of the Milky Way and a corresponding point on the rotational axis of the galaxy.
The LMC is predicted to merge with the Milky Way in approximately 2.4 billion years. With a declination of about −70°, the LMC is visible as a faint "cloud" from the southern hemisphere of the Earth and from as far north as 20° N.
In astronomy, galactocentrism is the theory that the Milky Way Galaxy, home of Earth ' s Solar System, is at or near the center of the Universe. [1] [2] Thomas Wright and Immanuel Kant first speculated that fuzzy patches of light called nebulae were actually distant "island universes" consisting of many stellar systems . [3]
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.
Satellite galaxies that orbit from 1,000 ly (310 pc) of the edge of the disc of the Milky Way Galaxy to the edge of the dark matter halo of the Milky Way at 980,000 ly (300 kpc) from the center of the galaxy, [a] are generally depleted in hydrogen gas compared to those that orbit more distantly.
