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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 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.
The Milky Way has more than 150 known globulars, and there may be many more. Both the origin of globular clusters and their role in galactic evolution are unclear. Some are among the oldest objects in their galaxies and even the universe , constraining estimates of the universe's age .
The locations within the Milky Way that have the highest stellar density are the central core and the interior of globular clusters. A typical mass density for a globular cluster is 70 M Sun pc −3 , which is 500 times the mass density near the Sun. [2] In the solar neighborhood, the stellar density of a star cluster must be greater than 0.08 ...
Ordinary (baryonic) matter (4.9%) Dark matter (26.8%) Dark energy (68.3%) [6] The observable universe is a ball-shaped region of the universe consisting of all matter that can be observed from Earth or its space-based telescopes and exploratory probes at the present time; the electromagnetic radiation from these objects has had time to reach ...
The Local Group is the galaxy group that includes the Milky Way, where Earth is located. It has a total diameter of roughly 3 megaparsecs (10 million light-years; 9 × 10 19 kilometres ), [1] and a total mass of the order of 2 × 10 12 solar masses (4 × 10 42 kg). [2] It consists of two collections of galaxies in a "dumbbell" shape; the Milky ...
The total mass of the asteroid belt is significantly less than Pluto 's, and roughly twice that of Pluto's moon Charon. The asteroid belt is a torus -shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies ...
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 expansion of the universe is the increase in distance between gravitationally unbound parts of the observable universe with time. [1] It is an intrinsic expansion, so it does not mean that the universe expands "into" anything or that space exists "outside" it. To any observer in the universe, it appears that all but the nearest galaxies ...
The heliosphere is the magnetosphere, astrosphere, and outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun. It takes the shape of a vast, tailed bubble-like region of space. In plasma physics terms, it is the cavity formed by the Sun in the surrounding interstellar medium. The "bubble" of the heliosphere is continuously "inflated" by plasma originating from ...