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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.
List of nearest galaxies. This is a list of known galaxies within 3.8 megaparsecs (12.4 million light-years) of the Solar System, in ascending order of heliocentric distance, or the distance to the Sun. This encompasses about 50 major Local Group galaxies, and some that are members of neighboring galaxy groups, the M81 Group and the Centaurus A ...
The Sun is part of one of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms, known as the Orion–Cygnus Arm or Local Spur. [269] [270] It is a member of the thin disk population of stars orbiting close to the galactic plane. [271] Its speed around the center of the Milky Way is about 220 km/s, so that it completes one revolution every 240 million years. [268]
The Galactic Center, as seen by one of the 2MASS infrared telescopes, is located in the bright upper left portion of the image. Marked location of the Galactic Center. The Galactic Center is the barycenter of the Milky Way and a corresponding point on the rotational axis of the galaxy. [ 1][ 2] Its central massive object is a supermassive black ...
The galactic coordinate system is a celestial coordinate system in spherical coordinates, with the Sun as its center, the primary direction aligned with the approximate center of the Milky Way Galaxy, and the fundamental plane parallel to an approximation of the galactic plane but offset to its north. It uses the right-handed convention ...
Details. Earth is the third planet from the Sun with an approximate distance of 149.6 million kilometres (93.0 million miles), and is traveling nearly 2.1 million kilometres per hour (1.3 million miles per hour) through outer space. [ 11]
Being part of the Milky Way galaxy the Sun, taking along the whole Solar System, moves in an orbital fashion around the galaxy's center of mass at an average speed of 230 km/s (828,000 km/h) or 143 mi/s (514,000 mph), [160] taking about 220–250 million Earth years to complete a revolution (a Galactic year), [161] having done so about 20 times ...
The Oort cloud ( / ɔːrt, ʊərt / ), [ 1] sometimes called the Öpik–Oort cloud, [ 2] is theorized to be a vast cloud of icy planetesimals surrounding the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 AU (0.03 to 3.2 light-years ). [ 3][ note 1][ 4] The concept of such a cloud was proposed in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, in whose ...