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The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with a D 25 isophotal diameter estimated at 26.8 ± 1.1 kiloparsecs (87,400 ± 3,600 light-years), but only about 1,000 light-years thick at the spiral arms (more at the bulge).
The Milky Way is about 100 000 light-years across. 1.65 × 10 5 ly: R136a1, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the most luminous star known at 8.7 million times the luminosity of the Sun, has an apparent magnitude 12.77, just brighter than 3C 273. 10 6: 2.5 × 10 6 ly: The Andromeda Galaxy is approximately 2.5 million light-years away. 3 × 10 6 ly
In November 2010, it was announced that two large elliptical lobe structures of energetic plasma, termed bubbles, which emit gamma- and X-rays, were detected astride the Milky Way galaxy's core. Termed Fermi or eRosita bubbles, they extend up to about 25,000 light years above and below the Galactic Center.
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.
Based on the D 25 isophote at the B-band (445 nm wavelength of light), the Large Magellanic Cloud is about 9.86 kiloparsecs (32,200 light-years) across. [1] [4] It is roughly one-hundredth the mass of the Milky Way [11] and is the fourth-largest galaxy in the Local Group , after the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the Milky Way, and the Triangulum ...
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).
It has a diameter measured through the D 25 standard - the isophote where the surface brightness of the galaxy reaches 25 mag/arcsec 2, to be about 18.74 kiloparsecs (61,100 light-years), [5] making it roughly 70% the size of the Milky Way. It may be a gravitationally bound companion of the Andromeda Galaxy.
For example, the nearest star to the Earth after the Sun is Proxima Centauri, about 4.2 light-years (4.0 × 10 13 km; 2.5 × 10 13 mi) or 30 million (3 × 10 7) solar diameters away.
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.
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.