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The first attempt to describe the shape of the Milky Way and the position of the Sun within it was carried out by William Herschel in 1785 by carefully counting the number of stars in different regions of the visible sky. He produced a diagram of the shape of the Milky Way with the Solar System close to the center.
Esperanto: Lakta Vojo "Milky Way", translated from Latin. Estonian: Linnutee "Way of Birds", from a myth; Finnish: Linnunrata "Way of Birds", from a myth; Faroese: Vetrarbreytin "The Winter Way" French: La Voie Lactée "The Milky Way", translated from Latin; Galician: Via Láctea "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Milky Way Galaxy's spiral arms and barred core – based on WISE data 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.
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 ...
Galaxies are categorized according to their visual morphology as elliptical, [5] spiral, or irregular. [6] The Milky Way is an example of a spiral galaxy. It is estimated that there are between 200 billion [7] ( 2 × 1011) to 2 trillion [8] galaxies in the observable universe.
The Andromeda Galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy and is the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way. It was originally named the Andromeda Nebula and is cataloged as Messier 31, M31, and NGC 224.
A NASA conception of the collision using computer-generated imagery. The Andromeda–Milky Way collision is a galactic collision predicted to occur in about 4.5 billion years between the two largest galaxies in the Local Group —the Milky Way (which contains the Solar System and Earth) and the Andromeda Galaxy.
To the Māori the Milky Way is the waka (canoe) of Tama-rereti. The front and back of the canoe are Orion and Scorpius, while the Southern Cross and the Pointers are the anchor and rope. According to legend, when Tama-rereti took his canoe out onto a lake, he found himself far from home as night was falling.
It has the approximate mass of 10 17 solar masses, or 100,000 times that of our galaxy, which is almost the same as that of the Horologium Supercluster. [3] It consists of four subparts, which were known previously as separate superclusters: Virgo Supercluster, the part in which the Milky Way resides.
Based on mass and increasingly precise radius limits, astronomers have concluded that Sagittarius A* must be the central supermassive black hole of the Milky Way galaxy. The current value of its mass is 4.297 ± 0.012 million solar masses .