The closest galaxy of comparable scope to the Milky Way Galaxy is the Andromeda Galaxy, which is approximately 2,560,000 light-years away. The closest body capable of being called a galaxy is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, approximately 25,000 light-years away. Even if Krypton was in this ...
Photograph of Milky Way taken from Earth by ESO/Yuri BeletskyDistance to centre of GalaxyHow far away is the center of our Galaxy? In the PennySystem model, in which the Solar System is the size of a penny, the galactic center would be about 660 meters from the Sun....
000 times more luminous than our Sun, temporarily making it the brightest star in our Milky Way galaxy. The mysterious star, called V838 Monocerotis, has long since faded back to obscurity. But observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope of a phenomenon called a “light echo” around the...
U Scorpii is the fastest known nova and one of the 10 known recurring novae in the Milky Way galaxy. A nova is a nuclear event in a white dwarf star that occurs as a result of accretion of hydrogen on the star’s surface. The accumulated hydrogen ignites, causing nuclear fusion. ...
Sagittarius A*, supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, located in the constellation Sagittarius and having a mass equivalent to four million Suns. The event horizon of the black hole has a radius of 12 million kilometers (seven mi
Composed of mostly molecular hydrogen, the Leo Ring is so vast it is six times wider than the Milky Way. The Leo Ring orbits two dwarf galaxies in the constellation and has become something of a puzzle to astronomers as it is large and dense enough to have collapsed to form its own ...
The Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8) is a bright emission nebula in the constellationSagittarius. It is an active stellar nursery, an area of dust and gas in space where stars are formed. It lies about 5,000 light-years away, near the center of our Milky Way Galaxy in the rich starfields of...
Andromeda Galaxy, great spiral galaxy in the constellation Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy. It is one of the few visible to the unaided eye, appearing as a milky blur. The Andromeda Galaxy is located about 2,480,000 light-years from Earth, and its di
The lovers secretly get married which the Goddess does not approve of at all and thus places a river in the sky to keep them apart. This river is our very own galaxy i.e. Milky Way. The legend goes that every year, in order to rejoin the lovers, all the magpies gather together and...
The high-velocity clouds might result from gas blown from the Milky Way disk into the halo by supernovae, in which case they would enrich the Galaxy with heavy elements as they fall back onto the disk. Alternatively, they may consist of metal-poor gas -- remnants of the era of galaxy ...