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The Milky Way is a huge collection of stars, dust and gas. It’s called a spiral galaxy because if you could view it from the top or bottom, it would look like a spinning pinwheel. The Sun is located on one of the spiral arms, about 25,000 light-years away from the center of the galaxy.
What is Milky Way Class 2?
The Sun and its planets (including Earth) lie in this quiet part of the galaxy, about half way out from the centre. The Milky Way is shaped like a huge whirlpool that rotates once every 200 million years. It is made up of at least 100 billion stars, as well as dust and gas. It is so big that light takes.
Is the Milky Way two galaxies?
Hubble Space Telescope observations indicate that the two galaxies, pulled together by their mutual gravity, will crash together about 4 billion years from now. Around 6 billion years from now, the two galaxies will merge to form a single galaxy.
What type of galaxy is the Andromeda Galaxy?
Andromeda Galaxy, also called Andromeda Nebula, (catalog numbers NGC 224 and M31), great spiral galaxy in the constellation Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy is one of the few visible to the unaided eye, appearing as a milky blur.
Is the Milky Way the second biggest galaxy?
The Milky Way is the second-largest galaxy in the Local Group (after the Andromeda Galaxy), with its stellar disk approximately 170,000–200,000 light-years (52–61 kpc) in diameter and, on average, approximately 1,000 ly (0.3 kpc) thick.
Which universe do we live in?
Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, contains at least 100 billion stars, and the observable universe contains at least 100 billion galaxies. If galaxies were all the same size, that would give us 10 thousand billion billion (or 10 sextillion) stars in the observable universe.
How old is our galaxy?
Most galaxies are between 10 billion and 13.6 billion years old. Our universe is about 13.8 billion years old, so most galaxies formed when the universe was quite young! Astronomers believe that our own Milky Way galaxy is approximately 13.6 billion years old.
Will the Milky Way collide with Andromeda?
Previous simulations have suggested that Andromeda and the Milky Way are scheduled for a head-on collision in about 4 billion to 5 billion years. But the new study estimates that the two star groups will swoop closely past each other about 4.3 billion years from now and then fully merge about 6 billion years later.
What is the largest galaxy in the universe?
Largest galaxy: IC 1101 Our Milky Way galaxy is around 100,000 light-years across, but that’s fairly average for a spiral galaxy. In comparison, the largest known galaxy, called IC 1101, is 50 times larger and about 2,000 times more massive than our galactic home.
Will humans ever leave the Milky Way?
Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is a disk of stars about 100,000 light-years across, and about 1,000 light-years thick. So, to leave our Galaxy, we would have to travel about 500 light-years vertically, or about 25,000 light-years away from the galactic centre.
What does Andromeda mean in English?
1 : an Ethiopian princess of Greek mythology rescued from a monster by her future husband Perseus. 2 [Latin (genitive Andromedae)] : a northern constellation directly south of Cassiopeia between Pegasus and Perseus.
Is Andromeda the nearest galaxy?
Although several dozen minor galaxies lie closer to our Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy is the closest large spiral galaxy to ours. Excluding the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, visible from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere, the Andromeda galaxy is the brightest external galaxy you can see.
How fast is Andromeda moving towards us?
The Andromeda galaxy is currently racing toward our Milky Way at a speed of about 70 miles (110 km) per second.
What is the biggest thing ever?
The biggest supercluster known in the universe is the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. It was first reported in 2013 and has been studied several times. It’s so big that light takes about 10 billion years to move across the structure. For perspective, the universe is only 13.8 billion years old.
Which is the smallest galaxy in the universe?
Scientists at the University of California at Irvine have discovered a galaxy so small that it barely even qualifies as a galaxy. Deemed “Segue 2,” the dwarf galaxy only contains about 1,000 stars and is the least massive galaxy in the known universe, reports Phys.org.
Is there anything bigger than the universe?
No, the universe contains all solar systems, and galaxies. Our Sun is just one star among the hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, and the universe is made up of all the galaxies – billions of them.
How many universes are there?
There are still some scientists who would say, hogwash. The only meaningful answer to the question of how many universes there are is one, only one universe.
What is outside the universe?
The universe, being all there is, is infinitely big and has no edge, so there’s no outside to even talk about. The current width of the observable universe is about 90 billion light-years. And presumably, beyond that boundary, there’s a bunch of other random stars and galaxies.
Does the universe go on forever?
Many think it’s likely you would just keep passing galaxies in every direction, forever. In that case, the universe would be infinite, with no end. Scientists now consider it unlikely the universe has an end – a region where the galaxies stop or where there would be a barrier of some kind marking the end of space.
What is the oldest thing in the universe?
Astronomers have found the farthest known source of radio emissions in the universe: a galaxy-swallowing supermassive black hole.
How old is our Earth?
Earth is estimated to be 4.54 billion years old, plus or minus about 50 million years. Scientists have scoured the Earth searching for the oldest rocks to radiometrically date.
Which is the oldest star?
Methuselah Star Name Age (in billions of years) Distance HD 140283 or the Methuselah Star 13.7 ± 0.7 200 ly 2MASS J18082002-5104378 B 13.53 1950 ly BD +17° 3248 13.8 ± 4 968 ly SMSS J031300.36-670839.3 13.6 6000 ly.
