Why is it difficult to tell what type of spiral galaxy the milky way is?

Which type of galaxy does Earth belong to?

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. Specifically, while it's tricky to tell from inside it, we're pretty sure it's a barred spiral galaxy.

Is our galaxy considered a typical galaxy?

It is sometimes difficult to tell; our judgment of the size of another galaxy is greatly influenced by the DISTANCE to the other galaxy, and the distance to another galaxy is sometimes tough to know with any precision. Astronomers have revised their distance estimates several times, and we cannot know that we're right THIS time. But based on what we currently believe to be true, the Milky Way is a larger-than-average galaxy similar to the Andromeda galaxy.

Why are we not for sure our galaxy is a spiral galaxy?

because nobody has ever been outside our galaxy so we can't tell if it is a spiral galaxy or not.

How do we know that we live in a spiral galaxy?

We know that we live in a spiral galaxy because of the shape and structure of the Milky Way, our home galaxy. Spiral galaxies have a distinct spiral shape with arms that wrap around a central bulge, and our observations of the Milky Way's structure and the movement of stars within it indicate that it fits the characteristics of a spiral galaxy.

Why is it so difficult to tell how many arms the Milky Way has?

Because from our vantage point, right in the galaxy itself, we cannot get a clear view. We see the galaxy edge-on, and much of it is obscured by the dense galactic center.

How old are the stars in spiral galaxies?

A spiral galaxy is just a type of galaxy but I can tell you that the stars in the middle are the oldest and the ones on the outside are the youngest.

Does the Milky Way have gravity?

Yes, as far as we can tell (it is difficult to see when you are in it) the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with at least four spiral arms. It is a disk of about 400 billion stars 1,000 light years thick with a diameter of about 100,000 light years. The bar in the center of the spiral rotates every 15 to 18 million years, while the spiral arm pattern (these are a pressure wave effect) rotates every 50 million years. Our sun which is 26,000 light-years form the center, rotates about the galactic core (the galactic center harbors a compact object of very large mass, strongly suspected to be a supermassive black hole ) once every 220 million years.

What is the name of the other galaxy?

there are millions and billions of galaxies. I will tell you 5 1:Our Milky Way galaxy 2:Cartwheel galaxy 3:Andromedia galaxy 4:Pegasus galaxy 5:Circinus

How is a spiral galaxy and a barred galaxy alike?

See related questions

When was the spiral galaxy discovered?

It wasn't until telescopes that people realized that the band of light reaching across the sky, called the Milky Way since ancient times, was actually made of an immense number of stars. Astronomers still did not really understand what they were seeing until the 20th century, however.Until the 1920s, astronomers thought that what we now know to be our Milky Way Galaxy to be the entire universe, and that our whole universe was a few thousand light years across. Other "spiral nebulae" had been observed, but they were thought to be new star systems forming nearby. After Hubble (the astronomer, not the telescope named for him) observed Cepheid variable stars in the Great Nebula in Andromeda, he realized that the Andromeda "Nebula" was immensley distant, and ennormous in size, and, by extension, the other "spiral nebulae" were also huge and incomprehensibly distant. He called them "island universes", and realized that we were also in one, and that the 'Milky Way' band of stars across the sky was our galaxy's disk, seen from inside. So, even though people have been calling the band of light across the sky the Milky Way for thousands of years, it wasn't until the 1920's that we understood what it was--our galaxy!We can see only a small part of our galaxy in visible light. Since the 1960s, radio astronomers have mapped out the structure of the entire galaxy, and shown it to be a large spiral galaxy of about 100 billion stars; we are in one of the spiral arms about 8 kiloparsecs (25,000 light years) from the center of our galaxy, more or less halfway from the center to the edge.I think Gallileo came across the milky way in the 1600's. The cloudy band we now call the Milky Way has been known since ancient times (it's referenced in various cultural mythologies, for example). However, it was only in the past few centuries that it was properly identified as a galaxy, specifically our own.== == The Milky Way's true age hasn't been discovered. The only knowledge we have is of a meteorite which dates 4.7 billion years ago. And yes, Galileo discovered the odd colors of the Milky Way in the 1600's. If we could escape our galaxy, scientists believe it would look like M-31(The Great Galaxy of Andromeda)I would hesitate to talk about a "discovery" of something that is in plain sight - that people have been seeing for ... well, for as long as there have been people. Like the Sun, or the Moon, or trees, or animals - or the Milky Way.

Why is it difficult to specify the dimensions of the disk and halo of the Milky Way?

Imagine that you were inside a large office building. Quick, what does it look like from the outside? That's basically why. While nearly all the individual stars we can see are in the Milky Way galaxy, we can only see a small fraction of them and being inside it, with dust clouds getting in the way (we can't even see, visually, the center of the galaxy, because of all the dust), it's kind of hard to tell what the overall shape is.Now, to put things into perspective: when we say that we're "not certain" of the shape, what we really mean is fine detail. Just as if you were in the central courtyard of the Pentagon, you could be pretty sure that the building is pentagonal, the chances of the Milky Way NOT being a spiral galaxy are so close to zero as to be indistinguishable from it in any practical sense, and we're pretty sure it's a barred spiral. Exactly how many arms and how many times they wrap around ... that we can't really tell, but the gross structure is pretty nearly a dead lock.

What is the other name of 5 galaxies?