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Milky Way Galaxy
The Milky Way, named for how its pale light is seen from Earth, is the galaxy that our solar system belongs to.
954 Questions
Can the Andromeda galaxy have more gravity than the milky way?
They are both spiral galaxies, except the Milky Way is a barred spiral and the Andromeda is a typical spiral galaxy. The Andromeda has at least twice as many stars as the Milky Way, and it has more mass. The galaxies are going to merge in 4 billion years, and now they are about 2 million light years apart.
What is the weather like on the milky way?
Like a long (milky colored) cloud in the sky - that moves with the stars and not the wind.
How big is the Milky Way in parsecs?
According to newest observations, 258,000ly across, or 1.5167 quintillion miles. but 18 zeros are quintillion in the USA, remember that in some places like mine 18 zeros is a trillion.
Who invented the milky way bar?
Because people thought the milky way needed something to represent it's creaminess.
Where is the milky way compared to earth?
Interestingly, it doesn't matter whether you prefer the answer in kilometers,
in miles, or in inches. The exact figure is still zero. Earth is IN the Milky Way.
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.
Where is our sun located at in the milky way?
We - as in the Solar System, are located about 25,000 light years from the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy and about 25,000 light years from the edge.
The Sun and the rest of the Solar System are close to the inner rim of the galaxy's Orion Arm, in the Local Fluff inside the Local Bubble, and in the Gould Belt.
As a picture is better than words, see related link for an artists impression.
diameter 100,00 light years
thikness 1,000 light year
Milky Way Galaxy
Infrared image of the core of the Milky Way GalaxyObservation dataTypeSBbc (barred spiral galaxy)Diameter100,000 light years[1]Thickness1,000 light years[1]Number of stars100-400 billion (1-4×1011) [2] [3] [4]Oldest known star13.2 billion years[5]Mass5.8 × 1011 M☉Sun's distance to galactic center26,000 ± 1,400 light-years[citation needed]Sun's galactic rotation period220 million years (negative rotation)[citation needed]Spiral pattern rotation period50 million years[6]Bar pattern rotation period15 to 18 million years[6]Speed relative to CMB rest frame552
a light year is how long it take for the light to reach its place example: 1,000 light years is how long it takes for the light to reach its place answer 1,000 years
What type of a galaxy is the milky way galaxy?
The milky way is classified as a galaxy...
A barred spiral galaxy.
Yes, I believe I have seen it before on a trip to keywest. It's tough to pinpoint my exact location at the time, but we were driving close to midnight and stopped on the 7-mile bridge to look at the ocean at night. To our surprise, it was an amazingly clear night and when we looked up into the heavens the Milky Way was brilliantly shining across the southern sky.
What is the coldest place in the milky way?
The coldest place in the Universe is in the Boomerang Nebula, a cloud of dust and gases 5,000 light years from Earth. It has a temperature of -457. F (-272 C) and is formed by the rapid expansion of gas and dust flowing away form its central aging star.
Are the asteroids in the Milky Way?
Now, let's get serious. There are no aliens known to exist, just a bunch of anecdotes, and no matter how high you stack anecdotes, they never become evidence. We hope there is other life out there, and we consider it likely. But someone has to be the first form of intelligent life in the universe, and there is no evidence that it isn't us.
How many constellations are in the milky way?
This is impossible to know, although some may know how to make an educated guess. We don't know the precise number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and we are just now learning how to locate planets orbiting relatively close stars. So far, the planets we have discovered are very large and Jupiter-like. This is not because that is the only kind of planet there is outside of our own system; it's because the very large and relatively near-by planets are the only ones we can currently detect. It may be thousands of years before we have a decent idea how many moons there are in our galaxy. We may never know.
How is the Milky Way held together?
Gravity. All the stars orbit around a super massive black hole in the center of the galaxy. The black hole and all the other stars in the galaxy are gravitationally bound, but not necessarily locked, and travel through the universe together.
Is the milky way big or small?
Depends on what you define as "big" or "small"... The nearest star from our Solar System, Toliman (Alpha Centauri), is 4 light-years away. This is already an incredible distance, by our standards; each light-year has almost 10 million million kilometers. It would take our current spacecraft thousands of years to reach there.
The diameter of our galaxy (the Milky Way), however, is about 100,000 light-years - about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 km., 10 to the power 18.
Does the Milky Way have water of any form?
Yes. The Milky Way is the name we give to our galaxy. All the stars we can see are in our own galaxy, so all the constellations we see are part of the Milky Way. At certain parts of the night sky we can see a dusty pattern through the sky which most people call the Milky Way. However, it is just part of it, and every star we can see is part of the Milky Way too, including the Sun and all the planets and of course Earth.
Is the sun in the Milky Way galactic halo?
It is not. On the other hand, the Milky way sun creates the halo. When you see milky from above, it is diffucult to notice the halo. If you shift or rotate the view, you can see that the Milky way halo is a cicurference with the sun in the center and it covers all planets circling this sun.
The term galactic halo is used to denote an extended, roughly spherical component of a galaxy, which extends beyond the main, visible component. It can refer to any of several distinct components which share these properties
How big is the Milky Way Galaxy?
The milky way is approximately 100,000 light years across and 1,000 ly thick at the thickest part.
1 mile = 63,360 inches
1 ly = 9.461×1015 miles.
So 1,000 ly = 9.461 x 1018 miles = 5.99x1023 inches thick.
100,000 ly = 9.461 x 1020 miles = 5.99x1025 inches across.
What constellation does the milky way galaxy go through?
The Milky Way stretches through various constellations, so it does not belong to any one of them.
No. The Milky Way galaxy is just one of billions of galaxies in the Universe. Just like there are billions of planets in the Milky Way Galaxy, there are also comparable numbers of planets in other galaxies.
What are the characteristics of your Milky Way?
- We live in it.
- It is 100,000 light years wide
- We are about 26,000 light years from the centre.
- We travel around the centre at about 515,000 mph
- It is a barred spiral galaxy
- It is about 13.2 billion years old
- In about 3 billion years time it will "merge" with the Andromeda Galaxy
- It contains between 200 and 400 billion stars
- There is a super massive black hole at it's centre.
- It has four main arms - of which we are in one of them. (Orion-Cygnus arm)
- It is part of the "Local Group"
- Which is part of the Virgo Supercluster.
- It was called the Milky Way because early people believed it was spilt milk.
1. The milky way has a super massive black hole at the center.
2. The milky way is a spiral galaxy.
What supercluster is the Milky Way Found in?
The Milky Way is part of the Local Group, which is part of the Virgo Supercluster.
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.
Where do stars form in the milky way?
There are all kinds of stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Our sun is a G2V type star. There are red giants, blue giants, white dwarfs, red dwarfs, brown dwarfs, and probably even black dwarfs (burned out suns), neutron stars, and pulsars. There are also herbig-haro objects, a peculiar type of star that emits collimated bipolar jets of radiation.
