Blog
Save
Email
Print
ShareThe Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy which forms part of the Local Group.
Although the Milky Way is but one of billions of galaxies in the universe, the Galaxy has special significance to humanity as it is the home of the solar system.
The term "milky" originates from the hazy band of white light appearing across the celestial sphere visible from Earth, which comprises stars and other material lying within the galactic plane.
The galaxy appears brightest in the direction of Sagittarius, towards the galactic center.
Relative to the celestial equator, the Milky Way passes as far north as the constellation of Cassiopeia and as far south as the constellation of Crux, indicating the high inclination of Earth's equatorial plane and the plane of the ecliptic relative to the galactic plane.
The fact that the Milky Way divides the night sky into two roughly equal hemispheres indicates that the solar system lies close to the galactic plane.
The main disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is about 80,000 to 100,000 light-years in diameter, about 250,000 to 300,000 light-years in circumference, and outside the Galactic core, about 1,000 light-years in thickness.
It is composed of 200 to 400 billion stars.
For more information about the topic Milky Way, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:
Local Group — The Local Group (also called M31 group or the Andromeda group) is the group of galaxies that includes our galaxy, the Milky Way. The group comprises ... > read more
Magellanic Clouds — The two Magellanic Clouds are irregular dwarf galaxies orbiting our Milky Way galaxy, and thus are members of our Local Group of galaxies.The Large ... > read more
Star cluster — Star clusters are groups of stars which are gravitationally bound. Two distinct types of star cluster can be distinguished: globular clusters are ... > read more
Barred spiral galaxy — A barred spiral galaxy is a spiral galaxy with a band of bright stars emerging from the center and running across the middle of the ... > read more
Galaxy formation and evolution — The formation of galaxies is still one of the most active research areas in astrophysics; and, to some extent, this is also true for galaxy ... > read more
Light-year — A light-year or lightyear (symbol: ly) is a unit of measurement of length, specifically the distance light travels in a vacuum in one year. While ... > read more
Large-scale structure of the cosmos — In physical cosmology, the term large-scale structure refers to the characterization of observable distributions of matter and light on the largest ... > read more
Hubble Deep Field — The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) is an image of a small region of the sky, based on the results of a series of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. ... > read more
Open cluster — An open cluster is a group of up to a few thousand stars that were formed from the same giant molecular cloud, and are still loosely gravitationally ... > read moreRecommend this page on Facebook, Twitter,
and Google +1:
Other bookmarking and sharing tools:
more 