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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.
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 list aims to reflect current knowledge: not all galaxies within the 3.8 Mpc radius have been discovered. Nearby dwarf galaxies are still being discovered, and galaxies located behind the central plane of the Milky Way are extremely difficult to discern. It is possible for any galaxy to mask another located beyond it.
The Laniakea Supercluster (/ ˌ l ɑː n i. ə ˈ k eɪ. ə /; Hawaiian for "open skies" or "immense heaven") is the galaxy supercluster that is home to the Milky Way and approximately 100,000 other nearby galaxies.
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.
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.
1995 — First detection of small-scale structure in the cosmic microwave background. 1995 — Hubble Deep Field survey of galaxies in field 144 arc seconds across. 1998 — The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey maps the large-scale structure in a section of the Universe close to the Milky Way. 1998 — The Hubble Deep Field South is compiled.
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.
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.
As an example, the Milky Way is roughly 100,000–180,000 light-years in diameter, [54] [55] and the nearest sister galaxy to the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, is located roughly 2.5 million light-years away.
