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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 Laniakea Supercluster ( / ˌlɑːni.əˈkeɪ.ə /; Hawaiian for "open skies" or "immense heaven") [2] is the galaxy supercluster that is home to the Milky Way and approximately 100,000 other nearby galaxies. It was defined in September 2014, when a group of astronomers including R. Brent Tully of the University of Hawaiʻi, Hélène ...
List of the largest known stars in the Milky Way Star name Solar radii (Sun = 1) Method Notes Orbit of Saturn: 2,047 – 2,049.9: Reported for reference: WOH G64 (For comparison) 1,540 ± 77: L/T eff: Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Possibly the largest known star. Theoretical limit of star size (Milky Way)
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.
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.
In the Milky Way Inferred orbits of six stars around supermassive black hole candidate Sagittarius A* at the Milky Way Galactic Center. Evidence indicates that the Milky Way galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, 26,000 light-years from the Solar System, in a region called Sagittarius A* because:
The Milky Way has several smaller galaxies gravitationally bound to it, as part of the Milky Way subgroup, which is part of the local galaxy cluster, the Local Group.. There are 61 small galaxies confirmed to be within 420 kiloparsecs (1.4 million light-years) of the Milky Way, but not all of them are necessarily in orbit, and some may themselves be in orbit of other satellite galaxies.