Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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 Milky Way Galaxy, where the Solar System is located, is classified as a barred spiral galaxy. Edwin Hubble classified spiral galaxies of this type as "SB" (spiral, barred) in his Hubble sequence and arranged them into sub-categories based on how open the arms of the spiral are. SBa types feature tightly bound arms, while SBc types are at ...
The Milky Way was once considered an ordinary spiral galaxy. Astronomers first began to suspect that the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy in the 1960s. Their suspicions were confirmed by Spitzer Space Telescope observations in 2005, which showed that the Milky Way's central bar is larger than what was previously suspected. Famous examples
The Hubble sequence is a morphological classification scheme for galaxies published by Edwin Hubble in 1926. It is often colloquially known as the Hubble tuning-fork diagram because the shape in which it is traditionally represented resembles a tuning fork.
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.
A globular cluster is a spheroidal conglomeration of stars that is bound together by gravity, with a higher concentration of stars towards their centers. They can contain anywhere from tens of thousands to many millions of member stars, [2] all orbiting in a stable, compact formation. Globular clusters are similar in form to dwarf spheroidal ...
Galactic bulge. Artist's impression of the central bulge of the Milky Way [1] In astronomy, a galactic bulge (or simply bulge) is a tightly packed group of stars within a larger star formation. The term almost exclusively refers to the central group of stars found in most spiral galaxies (see galactic spheroid ).
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. [259]
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. It uses the right-handed convention ...
The Magellanic Clouds ( Magellanic system [2] [3] or Nubeculae Magellani [4]) are two irregular dwarf galaxies in the southern celestial hemisphere. Orbiting the Milky Way galaxy, these satellite galaxies are members of the Local Group. Because both show signs of a bar structure, they are often reclassified as Magellanic spiral galaxies.