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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 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 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.
Milky Way dark matter halo The visible disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is thought to be embedded in a much larger, roughly spherical halo of dark matter. The dark matter density drops off with distance from the galactic center.
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 ...
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 Sun is a G-type main-sequence star that makes up about 99.86% of the mass of the Solar System. It has an absolute magnitude of +4.83, estimated to be brighter than about 85% of the stars in the Milky Way, most of which are red dwarfs. [32] [33] The Sun is a Population I, or heavy-element-rich, [b] star. [34]
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 ...
Makemake. Makemake [e] ( minor-planet designation: 136472 Makemake) is a dwarf planet and the second-largest of what is known as the classical population of Kuiper belt objects, [b] with a diameter approximately that of Saturn's moon Iapetus, or 60% that of Pluto. [24] [25] It has one known satellite. [26]