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The Milky Way is approximately 890 billion to 1.54 trillion times the mass of the Sun in total (8.9 × 10 11 to 1.54 × 10 12 solar masses), [7][8][9] although stars and planets make up only a small part of this. Estimates of the mass of the Milky Way vary, depending upon the method and data used.
The Milky Way was once considered an ordinary spiral galaxy. Astronomers first began to suspect that the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy in the 1960s. [35] [36] Their suspicions were confirmed by Spitzer Space Telescope observations in 2005, [37] which showed that the Milky Way's central bar is larger than what was previously suspected.
The Milky Way is brighter in the Southern Hemisphere than in the North. (Photo taken at La Silla Observatory) [2]. The fact that the sky is not completely dark at night, even in the absence of moonlight and city lights, can be easily observed, since if the sky were absolutely dark, one would not be able to see the silhouette of an object against the sky.
The Milky Way is approximately 890 billion to 1.54 trillion times the mass of the Sun in total (8.9 × 10 11 to 1.54 × 10 12 solar masses), [7][8][9] although stars and planets make up only a small part of this. Estimates of the mass of the Milky Way vary, depending upon the method and data used.
There are 61 small galaxies confirmed to be within 420 kiloparsecs (1.4 million light-years) of the Milky Way, [ 2 ] but not all of them are necessarily in orbit, and some may themselves be in orbit of other satellite galaxies. The only ones visible to the naked eye are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which have been observed since ...
Supercluster. A map of the superclusters and voids nearest to Earth. A supercluster is a large group of smaller galaxy clusters or galaxy groups; [1] they are among the largest known structures in the universe. The Milky Way is part of the Local Group galaxy group (which contains more than 54 galaxies), which in turn is part of the Virgo ...
The Milky Way is an example of a spiral galaxy. It is estimated that there are between 200 billion [7] (2 × 10 11) to 2 trillion [8] galaxies in the observable universe. Most galaxies are 1,000 to 100,000 parsecs in diameter (approximately 3,000 to 300,000 light years) and are separated by distances in the order of millions of parsecs (or ...
The Hubble sequence is a morphological classification scheme for galaxies published by Edwin Hubble in 1926. [1][2][3][4] It is often colloquially known as the Hubble tuning-fork diagram because the shape in which it is traditionally represented resembles a tuning fork. It was invented by John Henry Reynolds and Sir James Jeans.