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Milky Way

January 26, 2023

This article is about the galaxy. For other uses, see Milky Way (disambiguation).

The Milky Way[b] is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. The term Milky Way is a translation of the Latin via lactea, from the Greek γαλακτικός κύκλος (galaktikos kýklos), meaning "milky circle".[24][25] From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a band because its disk-shaped structure is viewed from within. Galileo Galilei first resolved the band of light into individual stars with his telescope in 1610. Until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the Universe.[26] Following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Doust Curtis,[27] observations by Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies.

Milky Way
The Galactic Center as seen from Earth's night sky (the laser creates a guide-star for the telescope)
Observation data (J2000 epoch)
ConstellationSagittarius
Right ascension17h 45m 40.03599s[1]
Declination−29° 00′ 28.1699″[1]
Distance7.935–8.277 kpc (25,881–26,996 ly)[2][3][4][a]
Characteristics
TypeSb; Sbc; SB(rs)bc[5][6]
Mass1.15×1012[7] M☉
Number of stars100–500 billion ((1–4)×1011)[10][11]
Size26.8 ± 1.1 kpc (87,400 ± 3,590 ly)
(radius; 25.0 mag/arcsec2 B-band isophote)[8][9]
Thickness of thin disk220–450 pc (718–1,470 ly)[12]
Thickness of thick disk2.6 ± 0.5 kpc (8,500 ± 1,600 ly)[12]
Angular momentum≈1×1067 J s[13]
Sun's Galactic rotation period212 Myr[14]
Spiral pattern rotation period220–360 Myr[15]
Bar pattern rotation period160–180 Myr[16]
Speed relative to CMB rest frame552.2±5.5 km/s[17]
Escape velocity at Sun's position550 km/s[18]
Dark matter density at Sun's position0.0088+0.0024
−0.0018 M☉pc−3 (0.35+0.08
−0.07 GeV cm−3)[18]

The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with an estimated D25 isophotal diameter of 26.8 ± 1.1 kiloparsecs (87,400 ± 3,590 light-years),[8] but only about 1,000 light years thick at the spiral arms (more at the bulge). Recent simulations suggest that a dark matter area, also containing some visible stars, may extend up to a diameter of almost 2 million light-years (613 kpc).[28][29] The Milky Way has several satellite galaxies and is part of the Local Group of galaxies, which form part of the Virgo Supercluster, which is itself a component of the Laniakea Supercluster.[30][31]

It is estimated to contain 100–400 billion stars[32][33] and at least that number of planets.[34][35] The Solar System is located at a radius of about 27,000 light-years (8.3 kpc) from the Galactic Center,[36] on the inner edge of the Orion Arm, one of the spiral-shaped concentrations of gas and dust. The stars in the innermost 10,000 light-years form a bulge and one or more bars that radiate from the bulge. The Galactic Center is an intense radio source known as Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole of 4.100 (± 0.034) million solar masses.[37][38] Stars and gases at a wide range of distances from the Galactic Center orbit at approximately 220 kilometers per second. The constant rotational speed appears to contradict the laws of Keplerian dynamics and suggests that much (about 90%)[39][40] of the mass of the Milky Way is invisible to telescopes, neither emitting nor absorbing electromagnetic radiation. This conjectural mass has been termed "dark matter".[41] The rotational period is about 212 million years at the radius of the Sun.[14]

The Milky Way as a whole is moving at a velocity of approximately 600 km per second with respect to extragalactic frames of reference. The oldest stars in the Milky Way are nearly as old as the Universe itself and thus probably formed shortly after the Dark Ages of the Big Bang.[42]

Etymology and mythology

 
The Origin of the Milky Way by Tintoretto (circa 1575–1580)
Main articles: List of names for the Milky Way and Milky Way (mythology)

In the Babylonian epic poem Enūma Eliš, the Milky Way is created from the severed tail of the primeval salt water dragoness Tiamat, set in the sky by Marduk, the Babylonian national god, after slaying her.[43][44] This story was once thought to have been based on an older Sumerian version in which Tiamat is instead slain by Enlil of Nippur,[45][46] but is now thought to be purely an invention of Babylonian propagandists with the intention to show Marduk as superior to the Sumerian deities.[46]

In Greek mythology, Zeus places his son born by a mortal woman, the infant Heracles, on Hera's breast while she is asleep so the baby will drink her divine milk and thus become immortal. Hera wakes up while breastfeeding and then realizes she is nursing an unknown baby: she pushes the baby away, some of her milk spills, and it produces the band of light known as the Milky Way. In another Greek story, the abandoned Heracles is given by Athena to Hera for feeding, but Heracles' forcefulness causes Athena to rip him from her breast in pain.[47][48][49]

Llys Dôn (literally "The Court of Dôn") is the traditional Welsh name for the constellation Cassiopeia. At least three of Dôn's children also have astronomical associations: Caer Gwydion ("The fortress of Gwydion") is the traditional Welsh name for the Milky Way,[50][51] and Caer Arianrhod ("The Fortress of Arianrhod") being the constellation of Corona Borealis.[52][53]

In western culture, the name "Milky Way" is derived from its appearance as a dim un-resolved "milky" glowing band arching across the night sky. The term is a translation of the Classical Latin via lactea, in turn derived from the Hellenistic Greek γαλαξίας, short for γαλαξίας κύκλος (galaxías kýklos), meaning "milky circle". The Ancient Greek γαλαξίας (galaxias) – from root γαλακτ-, γάλα ("milk") + -ίας (forming adjectives) – is also the root of "galaxy", the name for our, and later all such, collections of stars.[24][54][55]

The Milky Way, or "milk circle", was just one of 11 "circles" the Greeks identified in the sky, others being the zodiac, the meridian, the horizon, the equator, the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, the Arctic Circle and the Antarctic Circle, and two colure circles passing through both poles.[56]

 
A view of the Milky Way toward the constellation Sagittarius (including the Galactic Center), as seen from a dark site with little light pollution (the Black Rock Desert, Nevada), the bright object on the lower right is Jupiter, just above Antares

Appearance

A time-lapse video capturing the Milky Way arching over ALMA

The Milky Way is visible as a hazy band of white light, some 30° wide, arching the night sky.[57] Although all the individual naked-eye stars in the entire sky are part of the Milky Way Galaxy, the term "Milky Way" is limited to this band of light.[58][59] The light originates from the accumulation of unresolved stars and other material located in the direction of the galactic plane. Brighter regions around the band appear as soft visual patches known as star clouds. The most conspicuous of these is the Large Sagittarius Star Cloud, a portion of the central bulge of the galaxy.[60] Dark regions within the band, such as the Great Rift and the Coalsack, are areas where interstellar dust blocks light from distant stars. Peoples of the southern hemisphere, including the Inca and Australian aborigines, identified these regions as dark cloud constellations.[61] The area of sky that the Milky Way obscures is called the Zone of Avoidance.[62]

The Milky Way has a relatively low surface brightness. Its visibility can be greatly reduced by background light, such as light pollution or moonlight. The sky needs to be darker than about 20.2 magnitude per square arcsecond in order for the Milky Way to be visible.[63] It should be visible if the limiting magnitude is approximately +5.1 or better and shows a great deal of detail at +6.1.[64] This makes the Milky Way difficult to see from brightly lit urban or suburban areas, but very prominent when viewed from rural areas when the Moon is below the horizon.[c] Maps of artificial night sky brightness show that more than one-third of Earth's population cannot see the Milky Way from their homes due to light pollution.[65]

As viewed from Earth, the visible region of the Milky Way's galactic plane occupies an area of the sky that includes 30 constellations.[d] The Galactic Center lies in the direction of Sagittarius, where the Milky Way is brightest. From Sagittarius, the hazy band of white light appears to pass around to the galactic anticenter in Auriga. The band then continues the rest of the way around the sky, back to Sagittarius, dividing the sky into two roughly equal hemispheres.[citation needed]

The galactic plane is inclined by about 60° to the ecliptic (the plane of Earth's orbit). Relative to the celestial equator, it passes as far north as the constellation of Cassiopeia and as far south as the constellation of Crux, indicating the high inclination of Earth's equatorial plane and the plane of the ecliptic, relative to the galactic plane. The north galactic pole is situated at right ascension 12h 49m, declination +27.4° (B1950) near β Comae Berenices, and the south galactic pole is near α Sculptoris. Because of this high inclination, depending on the time of night and year, the Milky Way arch may appear relatively low or relatively high in the sky. For observers from latitudes approximately 65° north to 65° south, the Milky Way passes directly overhead twice a day.[citation needed]

  •  

    The Milky Way arching at a high inclination across the night sky, (this composited panorama was taken at Paranal Observatory in northern Chile); the Magellanic Clouds can be seen on the left; the bright object near top center is Jupiter in the constellation Sagittarius, and the orange glow at the horizon on the right is Antofagasta city with a jet trail above it; galactic north is downward.

  •  

    The Milky Way viewed at different wavelengths

Astronomical history

See also: Galaxy § Observation history
 
The shape of the Milky Way as deduced from star counts by William Herschel in 1785; the Solar System was assumed near center

In Meteorologica, Aristotle (384–322 BC) states that the Greek philosophers Anaxagoras (c. 500–428 BC) and Democritus (460–370 BC) proposed that the Milky Way is the glow of stars not directly visible due to Earth's shadow, while other stars receive their light from the Sun (but have their glow obscured by solar rays).[66] Aristotle himself believed that the Milky Way was part of the Earth's upper atmosphere (along with the stars), and that it was a byproduct of stars burning that did not dissipate because of its outermost location in the atmosphere (composing its great circle). He also said that the Milky appearance of the Milky Way galaxy was due to the refraction of the earth's atmosphere.[67][68][69] The Neoplatonist philosopher Olympiodorus the Younger (c. 495–570 AD) criticized this view, arguing that if the Milky Way were sublunary, it should appear different at different times and places on Earth, and that it should have parallax, which it does not. In his view, the Milky Way is celestial. This idea would be influential later in the Muslim world.[70]

The Persian astronomer Al-Biruni (973–1048) proposed that the Milky Way is "a collection of countless fragments of the nature of nebulous stars".[71] The Andalusian astronomer Avempace (d 1138) proposed the Milky Way to be made up of many stars but appears to be a continuous image in the Earth's atmosphere, citing his observation of a conjunction of Jupiter and Mars in 1106 or 1107 as evidence.[68] The Persian astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201–1274) in his Tadhkira wrote: "The Milky Way, i.e. the Galaxy, is made up of a very large number of small, tightly clustered stars, which, on account of their concentration and smallness, seem to be cloudy patches. Because of this, it was likened to milk in color."[72] Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (1292–1350) proposed that the Milky Way is "a myriad of tiny stars packed together in the sphere of the fixed stars".[73]

Proof of the Milky Way consisting of many stars came in 1610 when Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study the Milky Way and discovered that it is composed of a huge number of faint stars. Galileo also concluded that the appearance of the Milky Way was due to refraction of the Earth's atmosphere .[74][75][67] In a treatise in 1755, Immanuel Kant, drawing on earlier work by Thomas Wright,[76] speculated (correctly) that the Milky Way might be a rotating body of a huge number of stars, held together by gravitational forces akin to the Solar System but on much larger scales.[77] The resulting disk of stars would be seen as a band on the sky from our perspective inside the disk. Wright and Kant also conjectured that some of the nebulae visible in the night sky might be separate "galaxies" themselves, similar to our own. Kant referred to both the Milky Way and the "extragalactic nebulae" as "island universes", a term still current up to the 1930s.[78][79][80]

The first attempt to describe the shape of the Milky Way and the position of the Sun within it was carried out by William Herschel in 1785 by carefully counting the number of stars in different regions of the visible sky. He produced a diagram of the shape of the Milky Way with the Solar System close to the center.[81]

In 1845, Lord Rosse constructed a new telescope and was able to distinguish between elliptical and spiral-shaped nebulae. He also managed to make out individual point sources in some of these nebulae, lending credence to Kant's earlier conjecture.[82][83]

 
Photograph of the "Great Andromeda Nebula" from 1899, later identified as the Andromeda Galaxy

In 1904, studying the proper motions of stars, Jacobus Kapteyn reported that these were not random, as it was believed in that time; stars could be divided into two streams, moving in nearly opposite directions.[84] It was later realized that Kapteyn's data had been the first evidence of the rotation of our galaxy,[85] which ultimately led to the finding of galactic rotation by Bertil Lindblad and Jan Oort.[citation needed]

In 1917, Heber Curtis had observed the nova S Andromedae within the Great Andromeda Nebula (Messier object 31). Searching the photographic record, he found 11 more novae. Curtis noticed that these novae were, on average, 10 magnitudes fainter than those that occurred within the Milky Way. As a result, he was able to come up with a distance estimate of 150,000 parsecs. He became a proponent of the "island universes" hypothesis, which held that the spiral nebulae were independent galaxies.[86][87] In 1920 the Great Debate took place between Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, concerning the nature of the Milky Way, spiral nebulae, and the dimensions of the Universe. To support his claim that the Great Andromeda Nebula is an external galaxy, Curtis noted the appearance of dark lanes resembling the dust clouds in the Milky Way, as well as the significant Doppler shift.[88]

The controversy was conclusively settled by Edwin Hubble in the early 1920s using the Mount Wilson observatory 2.5 m (100 in) Hooker telescope. With the light-gathering power of this new telescope, he was able to produce astronomical photographs that resolved the outer parts of some spiral nebulae as collections of individual stars. He was also able to identify some Cepheid variables that he could use as a benchmark to estimate the distance to the nebulae. He found that the Andromeda Nebula is 275,000 parsecs from the Sun, far too distant to be part of the Milky Way.[89][90]

Astrography

 
Map of the Milky Way Galaxy with the constellations that cross the galactic plane in each direction and the known prominent components annotated including main arms, spurs, bar, nucleus/bulge, notable nebulae and globular clusters.
 
An all-sky view of stars in the Milky Way and neighbouring galaxies, based on the first year of observations from Gaia satellite, from July 2014 to September 2015. The map shows the density of stars in each portion of the sky. Brighter regions indicate denser concentrations of stars. Darker regions across the Galactic Plane correspond to dense clouds of interstellar gas and dust that absorb starlight.

The ESA spacecraft Gaia provides distance estimates by determining the parallax of a billion stars and is mapping the Milky Way with four planned releases of maps in 2016, 2018, 2021 and 2024.[91][92] Data from Gaia has been described as "transformational". It has been estimated that Gaia has expanded the number of observations of stars from about 2 million stars as of the 1990s to 2 billion. It has expanded the measurable volume of space by a factor of 100 in radius and a factor of 1,000 in precision.[93] A study in 2020 concluded that Gaia detected a wobbling motion of the galaxy, which might be caused by "torques from a misalignment of the disc's rotation axis with respect to the principal axis of a non-spherical halo, or from accreted matter in the halo acquired during late infall, or from nearby, interacting satellite galaxies and their consequent tides".[94]

Sun's location and neighborhood

See also: Location of Earth
 
 
Diagram of the Milky Way with the position of the Solar System marked by a yellow arrow and a red dot in the Orion Arm. The dot roughly covers the larger surroundings of the Solar System, the space between the Radcliffe wave and Split linear structures (formerly the Gould Belt).[95]
 
Artistic close-up of the Orion Arm with the main features of the Radcliffe Wave and Split linear structures, and with the Solar System surrounded by the closest large scale celestial features at the surface of the Local Bubble at a distance of 400–500 light years.

The Sun is near the inner rim of the Orion Arm, within the Local Fluff of the Local Bubble, between the Radcliffe wave and Split linear structures (formerly Gould Belt).[95] Based upon studies of stellar orbits around Sgr A* by Gillessen et al. (2016), the Sun lies at an estimated distance of 27.14 ± 0.46 kly (8.32 ± 0.14 kpc)[36] from the Galactic Center. Boehle et al. (2016) found a smaller value of 25.64 ± 0.46 kly (7.86 ± 0.14 kpc), also using a star orbit analysis.[96] The Sun is currently 5–30 parsecs (16–98 ly) above, or north of, the central plane of the Galactic disk.[97] The distance between the local arm and the next arm out, the Perseus Arm, is about 2,000 parsecs (6,500 ly).[98] The Sun, and thus the Solar System, is located in the Milky Way's galactic habitable zone.[99][100]

There are about 208 stars brighter than absolute magnitude 8.5 within a sphere with a radius of 15 parsecs (49 ly) from the Sun, giving a density of one star per 69 cubic parsecs, or one star per 2,360 cubic light-years (from List of nearest bright stars). On the other hand, there are 64 known stars (of any magnitude, not counting 4 brown dwarfs) within 5 parsecs (16 ly) of the Sun, giving a density of about one star per 8.2 cubic parsecs, or one per 284 cubic light-years (from List of nearest stars). This illustrates the fact that there are far more faint stars than bright stars: in the entire sky, there are about 500 stars brighter than apparent magnitude 4 but 15.5 million stars brighter than apparent magnitude 14.[101]

The apex of the Sun's way, or the solar apex, is the direction that the Sun travels through space in the Milky Way. The general direction of the Sun's Galactic motion is towards the star Vega near the constellation of Hercules, at an angle of roughly 60 sky degrees to the direction of the Galactic Center. The Sun's orbit about the Milky Way is expected to be roughly elliptical with the addition of perturbations due to the Galactic spiral arms and non-uniform mass distributions. In addition, the Sun passes through the Galactic plane approximately 2.7 times per orbit.[102] This is very similar to how a simple harmonic oscillator works with no drag force (damping) term. These oscillations were until recently thought to coincide with mass lifeform extinction periods on Earth.[103] A reanalysis of the effects of the Sun's transit through the spiral structure based on CO data has failed to find a correlation.[104]

It takes the Solar System about 240 million years to complete one orbit of the Milky Way (a galactic year),[105] so the Sun is thought to have completed 18–20 orbits during its lifetime and 1/1250 of a revolution since the origin of humans. The orbital speed of the Solar System about the center of the Milky Way is approximately 220 km/s (490,000 mph) or 0.073% of the speed of light. The Sun moves through the heliosphere at 84,000 km/h (52,000 mph). At this speed, it takes around 1,400 years for the Solar System to travel a distance of 1 light-year, or 8 days to travel 1 AU (astronomical unit).[106] The Solar System is headed in the direction of the zodiacal constellation Scorpius, which follows the ecliptic.[107]

Galactic quadrants

Main article: Galactic quadrant
 
Diagram of the Sun's location in the Milky Way, the angles represent longitudes in the galactic coordinate system.

A galactic quadrant, or quadrant of the Milky Way, refers to one of four circular sectors in the division of the Milky Way. In astronomical practice, the delineation of the galactic quadrants is based upon the galactic coordinate system, which places the Sun as the origin of the mapping system.[108]

Quadrants are described using ordinals – for example, "1st galactic quadrant",[109] "second galactic quadrant",[110] or "third quadrant of the Milky Way".[111] Viewing from the north galactic pole with 0° (zero degrees) as the ray that runs starting from the Sun and through the Galactic Center, the quadrants are:

Galactic
quadrant
  		Galactic
longitude
(ℓ) 		 
Reference
 
1st 0° ≤ ℓ ≤ 90°   [112]
2nd   90° ≤ ℓ ≤ 180° [110]
3rd 180° ≤ ℓ ≤ 270° [111]
4th
  		270° ≤ ℓ ≤ 360°
(360° ≅ 0°) 		[109]
 

with the galactic longitude (ℓ) increasing in the counter-clockwise direction (positive rotation) as viewed from north of the Galactic Center (a view-point several hundred thousand light-years distant from Earth in the direction of the constellation Coma Berenices); if viewed from south of the Galactic Center (a view-point similarly distant in the constellation Sculptor), ℓ would increase in the clockwise direction (negative rotation).

Size and mass

 
The structure of the Milky Way is thought to be similar to this galaxy (UGC 12158 imaged by Hubble)

Size

 
A size comparison of the six largest galaxies of the Local Group, together with the Milky Way

The Milky Way is one of the two largest galaxies in the Local Group (the other being the Andromeda Galaxy), although the size for its galactic disc and how much it defines the isophotal diameter is not well understood.[113] It is estimated that the significant bulk of stars in the galaxy lies within the 26 kiloparsecs (80,000 light-years) diameter, and that the number of stars beyond the outermost disc dramatically reduces to a very low number, with respect to an extrapolation of the exponential disk with the scale length of the inner disc.[114][113]

There are several methods being used in astronomy in defining the size of a galaxy, and each of them can yield different results with respect to one another. The most commonly employed method is the D25 standard – the isophote where the photometric brightness of a galaxy in the B-band (445 nm wavelength of light, in the blue part of the visible spectrum) reaches 25 mag/arcsec2.[115] An estimate from 1997 by Goodwin and others compared the distribution of Cepheid variable stars in 17 other spiral galaxies to the ones in the Milky Way, and modelling the relationship to their surface brightnesses. This gave an isophotal diameter for the Milky Way at 26.8 ± 1.1 kiloparsecs (87,400 ± 3,590 light-years), by assuming that the galactic disc is well represented by an exponential disc and adopting a central surface brightness of the galaxy (µ0) of 22.1±0.3 B-mag/arcsec−2 and a disk scale length (h) of 5.0 ± 0.5 kpc (16,000 ± 1,600 ly).[116][8][117] This is significantly smaller than the Andromeda Galaxy's isophotal diameter, and slightly below the mean isophotal sizes of the galaxies being at 28.3 kpc (92,000 ly).[8] The paper concludes that the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy were not overly large spiral galaxies and as well as one of the largest known (if the former not being the largest) as previously widely believed, but rather average ordinary spiral galaxies.[118] To compare the relative physical scale of the Milky Way, if the Solar System out to Neptune were the size of a US quarter (24.3 mm (0.955 in)), the Milky Way would be approximately at least the greatest north–south line of the contiguous United States.[119] An even older study from 1978 gave a lower diameter for Milky Way about 23 kpc (75,000 ly).[8]

A 2015 paper discovered that there is a ring-like filament of stars called Triangulum–Andromeda Ring (TriAnd Ring) rippling above and below the relatively flat galactic plane, which alongside Monoceros Ring were both suggested to be primarily the result of disk oscillations and wrapping around the Milky Way, at a diameter of at least 50 kpc (160,000 ly),[120] which may be part of the Milky Way's outer disk itself, hence making the stellar disk larger by increasing to this size.[121] However, a more recent 2018 paper later somewhat ruled out this hypothesis, and supported a conclusion that the Monoceros Ring, A13 and TriAnd Ring were stellar overdensities rather kicked out from the main stellar disk, with the velocity dispersion of the RR Lyrae stars found to be higher and consistent with halo membership.[122] Another 2018 study revealed the very probable presence of disk stars at 26–31.5 kpc (84,800–103,000 ly) from the Galactic Center or perhaps even farther, significantly beyond approximately 13–20 kpc (40,000–70,000 ly), in which it was once believed to be the abrupt drop-off of the stellar density of the disk, meaning that few or no stars were expected to be above this limit, save for stars that belong to the old population of the galactic halo.[113][123][124]

A 2020 study predicted the edge of the Milky Way's dark matter halo being around 292 ± 61 kpc (952,000 ± 199,000 ly), which translates to a diameter of 584 ± 122 kpc (1.905 ± 0.3979 Mly).[28][29] The Milky Way's stellar disk is also estimated to be approximately up to 1.35 kpc (4,000 ly) thick.[125][126]

 
A schematic profile of the Milky Way.
Abbreviations: GNP/GSP: Galactic North and South Poles

Mass

The Milky Way is approximately 890 billion to 1.54 trillion times the mass of the Sun in total (8.9×1011 to 1.54×1012 solar masses),[39][40][127] 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. The low end of the estimate range is 5.8×1011 solar masses (M☉), somewhat less than that of the Andromeda Galaxy.[128][129][130] Measurements using the Very Long Baseline Array in 2009 found velocities as large as 254 km/s (570,000 mph) for stars at the outer edge of the Milky Way.[131] Because the orbital velocity depends on the total mass inside the orbital radius, this suggests that the Milky Way is more massive, roughly equaling the mass of Andromeda Galaxy at 7×1011 M☉ within 160,000 ly (49 kpc) of its center.[132] In 2010, a measurement of the radial velocity of halo stars found that the mass enclosed within 80 kiloparsecs is 7×1011 M☉.[133] According to a study published in 2014, the mass of the entire Milky Way is estimated to be 8.5×1011 M☉,[134] but this is only half the mass of the Andromeda Galaxy.[134] A recent 2019 mass estimate for the Milky Way is 1.29×1012 M☉.[135]

Much of the mass of the Milky Way seems to be dark matter, an unknown and invisible form of matter that interacts gravitationally with ordinary matter. A dark matter halo is conjectured to spread out relatively uniformly to a distance beyond one hundred kiloparsecs (kpc) from the Galactic Center. Mathematical models of the Milky Way suggest that the mass of dark matter is 1–1.5×1012 M☉.[136][137][138] 2013 and 2014 studies indicate a range in mass, as large as 4.5×1012 M☉[139] and as small as 8×1011 M☉.[140] By comparison, the total mass of all the stars in the Milky Way is estimated to be between 4.6×1010 M☉[141] and 6.43×1010 M☉.[136] In addition to the stars, there is also interstellar gas, comprising 90% hydrogen and 10% helium by mass,[142] with two thirds of the hydrogen found in the atomic form and the remaining one-third as molecular hydrogen.[143] The mass of the Milky Way's interstellar gas is equal to between 10%[143] and 15%[142] of the total mass of its stars. Interstellar dust accounts for an additional 1% of the total mass of the gas.[142]

In March 2019, astronomers reported that the virial mass of the Milky Way galaxy is 1.54 trillion solar masses within a radius of about 39.5 kpc (130,000 ly), over twice as much as was determined in earlier studies, and suggesting that about 90% of the mass of the galaxy is dark matter.[39][40]

Contents

 
360-degree panorama view of the Milky Way (an assembled mosaic of photographs) by ESO, the galactic centre is in the middle of the view, with galactic north up
 
360-degree rendering of the Milky Way using Gaia EDR3 data showing interstellar gas, dust backlit by stars (main patches labeled in black; white labels are main bright patches of stars). Left hemisphere is facing the galactic center, right hemisphere is facing the galactic anticenter.

The Milky Way contains between 100 and 400 billion stars[10][11] and at least that many planets.[144] An exact figure would depend on counting the number of very-low-mass stars, which are difficult to detect, especially at distances of more than 300 ly (90 pc) from the Sun. As a comparison, the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy contains an estimated one trillion (1012) stars.[145] The Milky Way may contain ten billion white dwarfs, a billion neutron stars, and a hundred million stellar black holes.[e][148][149] Filling the space between the stars is a disk of gas and dust called the interstellar medium. This disk has at least a comparable extent in radius to the stars,[150] whereas the thickness of the gas layer ranges from hundreds of light-years for the colder gas to thousands of light-years for warmer gas.[151][152]

The disk of stars in the Milky Way does not have a sharp edge beyond which there are no stars. Rather, the concentration of stars decreases with distance from the center of the Milky Way. For reasons that are not understood, beyond a radius of roughly 40,000 light years (13 kpc) from the center, the number of stars per cubic parsec drops much faster with radius.[114] Surrounding the galactic disk is a spherical galactic halo of stars and globular clusters that extends farther outward, but is limited in size by the orbits of two Milky Way satellites, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, whose closest approach to the Galactic Center is about 180,000 ly (55 kpc).[153] At this distance or beyond, the orbits of most halo objects would be disrupted by the Magellanic Clouds. Hence, such objects would probably be ejected from the vicinity of the Milky Way. The integrated absolute visual magnitude of the Milky Way is estimated to be around −20.9.[154][155][f]

Both gravitational microlensing and planetary transit observations indicate that there may be at least as many planets bound to stars as there are stars in the Milky Way,[34][156] and microlensing measurements indicate that there are more rogue planets not bound to host stars than there are stars.[157][158] The Milky Way contains at least one planet per star, resulting in 100–400 billion planets, according to a January 2013 study of the five-planet star system Kepler-32 by the Kepler space observatory.[35] A different January 2013 analysis of Kepler data estimated that at least 17 billion Earth-sized exoplanets reside in the Milky Way.[159] On November 4, 2013, astronomers reported, based on Kepler space mission data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars and red dwarfs within the Milky Way.[160][161][162] 11 billion of these estimated planets may be orbiting Sun-like stars.[163] The nearest exoplanet may be 4.2 light-years away, orbiting the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, according to a 2016 study.[164] Such Earth-sized planets may be more numerous than gas giants,[34] though harder to detect at great distances given their small size. Besides exoplanets, "exocomets", comets beyond the Solar System, have also been detected and may be common in the Milky Way.[165] More recently, in November 2020, over 300 million habitable exoplanets are estimated to exist in the Milky Way Galaxy.[166]

Structure

 
Overview of different elements of the overall structure of the Milky Way.
 
Supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope in radio waves. The central dark spot is the black hole's shadow, which is larger than the event horizon.
 
Bright X-ray flares from Sagittarius A* (inset) in the center of the Milky Way, as detected by the Chandra X-ray Observatory.[167]
Artist's impression of how the Milky Way would look from different vantage points – from edge-on lines-of-sight, the peanut-shell-shaped structure, not to be confused with the galaxy's central bulge, is evident; viewed from above, the central narrow bar that is responsible for this structure appears clearly, as would many spiral arms and their associated dust clouds

The Milky Way consists of a bar-shaped core region surrounded by a warped disk of gas, dust and stars.[168][169] The mass distribution within the Milky Way closely resembles the type Sbc in the Hubble classification, which represents spiral galaxies with relatively loosely wound arms.[5] Astronomers first began to conjecture that the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy, rather than an ordinary spiral galaxy, in the 1960s.[170][171][172] These conjectures were confirmed by the Spitzer Space Telescope observations in 2005 that showed the Milky Way's central bar to be larger than previously thought.[173]

Galactic Center

Main article: Galactic Center

The Sun is 25,000–28,000 ly (7.7–8.6 kpc) from the Galactic Center. This value is estimated using geometric-based methods or by measuring selected astronomical objects that serve as standard candles, with different techniques yielding various values within this approximate range.[174][96][36][175][176][177] In the inner few kiloparsecs (around 10,000 light-years radius) is a dense concentration of mostly old stars in a roughly spheroidal shape called the bulge.[178] It has been proposed that the Milky Way lacks a bulge due to a collision and merger between previous galaxies, and that instead it only has a pseudobulge formed by its central bar.[179] However, confusion in the literature between the (peanut shell)-shaped structure created by instabilities in the bar, versus a possible bulge with an expected half-light radius of 0.5 kpc, abounds.[180]

The Galactic Center is marked by an intense radio source named Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star). The motion of material around the center indicates that Sagittarius A* harbors a massive, compact object.[181] This concentration of mass is best explained as a supermassive black hole[g][174][182] (SMBH) with an estimated mass of 4.1–4.5 million times the mass of the Sun.[182] The rate of accretion of the SMBH is consistent with an inactive galactic nucleus, being estimated at 1×10−5 M☉ per year.[183] Observations indicate that there are SMBHs located near the center of most normal galaxies.[184][185]

The nature of the Milky Way's bar is actively debated, with estimates for its half-length and orientation spanning from 1 to 5 kpc (3,000–16,000 ly) and 10–50 degrees relative to the line of sight from Earth to the Galactic Center.[176][177][186] Certain authors advocate that the Milky Way features two distinct bars, one nestled within the other.[187] However, RR Lyrae-type stars do not trace a prominent Galactic bar.[177][188][189] The bar may be surrounded by a ring called the "5 kpc ring" that contains a large fraction of the molecular hydrogen present in the Milky Way, as well as most of the Milky Way's star formation activity. Viewed from the Andromeda Galaxy, it would be the brightest feature of the Milky Way.[190] X-ray emission from the core is aligned with the massive stars surrounding the central bar[183] and the Galactic ridge.[191]

Gamma rays and x-rays

Since 1970, various gamma-ray detection missions have discovered 511-keV gamma rays coming from the general direction of the Galactic Center. These gamma rays are produced by positrons (antielectrons) annihilating with electrons. In 2008 it was found that the distribution of the sources of the gamma rays resembles the distribution of low-mass X-ray binaries, seeming to indicate that these X-ray binaries are sending positrons (and electrons) into interstellar space where they slow down and annihilate.[192][193][194] The observations were both made by NASA and ESA's satellites. In 1970 gamma ray detectors found that the emitting region was about 10,000 light-years across with a luminosity of about 10,000 suns.[193]

 
Illustration of the two gigantic X-ray/gamma-ray bubbles (blue-violet) of the Milky Way (center)

In 2010, two gigantic spherical bubbles of high energy gamma-emission were detected to the north and the south of the Milky Way core, using data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The diameter of each of the bubbles is about 25,000 light-years (7.7 kpc) (or about 1/4 of the galaxy's estimated diameter); they stretch up to Grus and to Virgo on the night-sky of the southern hemisphere.[195][196] Subsequently, observations with the Parkes Telescope at radio frequencies identified polarized emission that is associated with the Fermi bubbles. These observations are best interpreted as a magnetized outflow driven by star formation in the central 640 ly (200 pc) of the Milky Way.[197]

Later, on January 5, 2015, NASA reported observing an X-ray flare 400 times brighter than usual, a record-breaker, from Sagittarius A*. The unusual event may have been caused by the breaking apart of an asteroid falling into the black hole or by the entanglement of magnetic field lines within gas flowing into Sagittarius A*.[167]

Spiral arms

Further information: Spiral galaxy

Outside the gravitational influence of the Galactic bar, the structure of the interstellar medium and stars in the disk of the Milky Way is organized into four spiral arms.[198] Spiral arms typically contain a higher density of interstellar gas and dust than the Galactic average as well as a greater concentration of star formation, as traced by H II regions[199][200] and molecular clouds.[201]

The Milky Way's spiral structure is uncertain, and there is currently no consensus on the nature of the Milky Way's arms.[202] Perfect logarithmic spiral patterns only crudely describe features near the Sun,[200][203] because galaxies commonly have arms that branch, merge, twist unexpectedly, and feature a degree of irregularity.[177][203][204] The possible scenario of the Sun within a spur / Local arm[200] emphasizes that point and indicates that such features are probably not unique, and exist elsewhere in the Milky Way.[203] Estimates of the pitch angle of the arms range from about 7° to 25°.[150][205] There are thought to be four spiral arms that all start near the Milky Way Galaxy's center.[206] These are named as follows, with the positions of the arms shown in the image below:

 
Observed (normal lines) and extrapolated (dotted lines) structure of the spiral arms of the Milky Way, viewed from north of the galaxy – the galaxy rotates clockwise in this view. The gray lines radiating from the Sun's position (upper center) list the three-letter abbreviations of the corresponding constellations
Color Arm(s)
turquoise Near 3 kpc Arm and Perseus Arm
blue Norma and Outer arm (Along with extension discovered in 2004[207])
green Scutum–Centaurus Arm
red Carina–Sagittarius Arm
There are at least two smaller arms or spurs, including:
orange Orion–Cygnus Arm (which contains the Sun and Solar System)
 
Spitzer reveals what cannot be seen in visible light: cooler stars (blue), heated dust (reddish hue), and Sgr A* as bright white spot in the middle.
 
Artist's conception of the spiral structure of the Milky Way with two major stellar arms and a bar.[202]

Two spiral arms, the Scutum–Centaurus arm and the Carina–Sagittarius arm, have tangent points inside the Sun's orbit about the center of the Milky Way. If these arms contain an overdensity of stars compared to the average density of stars in the Galactic disk, it would be detectable by counting the stars near the tangent point. Two surveys of near-infrared light, which is sensitive primarily to red giants and not affected by dust extinction, detected the predicted overabundance in the Scutum–Centaurus arm but not in the Carina–Sagittarius arm: the Scutum–Centaurus Arm contains approximately 30% more red giants than would be expected in the absence of a spiral arm.[205][208] This observation suggests that the Milky Way possesses only two major stellar arms: the Perseus arm and the Scutum–Centaurus arm. The rest of the arms contain excess gas but not excess old stars.[202] In December 2013, astronomers found that the distribution of young stars and star-forming regions matches the four-arm spiral description of the Milky Way.[209][210][211] Thus, the Milky Way appears to have two spiral arms as traced by old stars and four spiral arms as traced by gas and young stars. The explanation for this apparent discrepancy is unclear.[211]

 
Clusters detected by WISE used to trace the Milky Way's spiral arms.

The Near 3 kpc Arm (also called the Expanding 3 kpc Arm or simply the 3 kpc Arm) was discovered in the 1950s by astronomer van Woerden and collaborators through 21 centimeter radio measurements of HI (atomic hydrogen).[212][213] It was found to be expanding away from the central bulge at more than 50 km/s. It is located in the fourth galactic quadrant at a distance of about 5.2 kpc from the Sun and 3.3 kpc from the Galactic Center. The Far 3 kpc Arm was discovered in 2008 by astronomer Tom Dame (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian). It is located in the first galactic quadrant at a distance of 3 kpc (about 10,000 ly) from the Galactic Center.[213][214]

A simulation published in 2011 suggested that the Milky Way may have obtained its spiral arm structure as a result of repeated collisions with the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy.[215]

It has been suggested that the Milky Way contains two different spiral patterns: an inner one, formed by the Sagittarius arm, that rotates fast and an outer one, formed by the Carina and Perseus arms, whose rotation velocity is slower and whose arms are tightly wound. In this scenario, suggested by numerical simulations of the dynamics of the different spiral arms, the outer pattern would form an outer pseudoring,[216] and the two patterns would be connected by the Cygnus arm.[217]

 
The long filamentary molecular cloud dubbed "Nessie" probably forms a dense "spine" of the Scutum–Centarus Arm

Outside of the major spiral arms is the Monoceros Ring (or Outer Ring), a ring of gas and stars torn from other galaxies billions of years ago. However, several members of the scientific community recently restated their position affirming the Monoceros structure is nothing more than an over-density produced by the flared and warped thick disk of the Milky Way.[218] The structure of the Milky Way's disk is warped along an "S" curve.[219]

Halo

The Galactic disk is surrounded by a spheroidal halo of old stars and globular clusters, of which 90% lie within 100,000 light-years (30 kpc) of the Galactic Center.[220] However, a few globular clusters have been found farther, such as PAL 4 and AM 1 at more than 200,000 light-years from the Galactic Center. About 40% of the Milky Way's clusters are on retrograde orbits, which means they move in the opposite direction from the Milky Way rotation.[221] The globular clusters can follow rosette orbits about the Milky Way, in contrast to the elliptical orbit of a planet around a star.[222]

Although the disk contains dust that obscures the view in some wavelengths, the halo component does not. Active star formation takes place in the disk (especially in the spiral arms, which represent areas of high density), but does not take place in the halo, as there is little cool gas to collapse into stars.[105] Open clusters are also located primarily in the disk.[223]

Discoveries in the early 21st century have added dimension to the knowledge of the Milky Way's structure. With the discovery that the disk of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) extends much farther than previously thought,[224] the possibility of the disk of the Milky Way extending farther is apparent, and this is supported by evidence from the discovery of the Outer Arm extension of the Cygnus Arm[207][225] and of a similar extension of the Scutum–Centaurus Arm.[226] With the discovery of the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy came the discovery of a ribbon of galactic debris as the polar orbit of the dwarf and its interaction with the Milky Way tears it apart. Similarly, with the discovery of the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, it was found that a ring of galactic debris from its interaction with the Milky Way encircles the Galactic disk.[citation needed]

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey of the northern sky shows a huge and diffuse structure (spread out across an area around 5,000 times the size of a full moon) within the Milky Way that does not seem to fit within current models. The collection of stars rises close to perpendicular to the plane of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. The proposed likely interpretation is that a dwarf galaxy is merging with the Milky Way. This galaxy is tentatively named the Virgo Stellar Stream and is found in the direction of Virgo about 30,000 light-years (9 kpc) away.[227]

Gaseous halo

In addition to the stellar halo, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, XMM-Newton, and Suzaku have provided evidence that there is a gaseous halo with a large amount of hot gas. The halo extends for hundreds of thousand of light-years, much farther than the stellar halo and close to the distance of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The mass of this hot halo is nearly equivalent to the mass of the Milky Way itself.[228][229][230] The temperature of this halo gas is between 1 and 2.5 million K (1.8 and 4.5 million °F).[231]

Observations of distant galaxies indicate that the Universe had about one-sixth as much baryonic (ordinary) matter as dark matter when it was just a few billion years old. However, only about half of those baryons are accounted for in the modern Universe based on observations of nearby galaxies like the Milky Way.[232] If the finding that the mass of the halo is comparable to the mass of the Milky Way is confirmed, it could be the identity of the missing baryons around the Milky Way.[232]

Galactic rotation

 
Galaxy rotation curve for the Milky Way – vertical axis is speed of rotation about the galactic center; horizontal axis is distance from the galactic center in kpcs; the sun is marked with a yellow ball; the observed curve of speed of rotation is blue; the predicted curve based upon stellar mass and gas in the Milky Way is red; scatter in observations roughly indicated by gray bars, the difference is due to dark matter[41][233][234]

The stars and gas in the Milky Way rotate about its center differentially, meaning that the rotation period varies with location. As is typical for spiral galaxies, the orbital speed of most stars in the Milky Way does not depend strongly on their distance from the center. Away from the central bulge or outer rim, the typical stellar orbital speed is between 210 ± 10 km/s (470,000 ± 22,000 mph).[235] Hence the orbital period of the typical star is directly proportional only to the length of the path traveled. This is unlike the situation within the Solar System, where two-body gravitational dynamics dominate, and different orbits have significantly different velocities associated with them. The rotation curve (shown in the figure) describes this rotation. Toward the center of the Milky Way the orbit speeds are too low, whereas beyond 7 kpcs the speeds are too high to match what would be expected from the universal law of gravitation.[citation needed]

If the Milky Way contained only the mass observed in stars, gas, and other baryonic (ordinary) matter, the rotational speed would decrease with distance from the center. However, the observed curve is relatively flat, indicating that there is additional mass that cannot be detected directly with electromagnetic radiation. This inconsistency is attributed to dark matter.[41] The rotation curve of the Milky Way agrees with the universal rotation curve of spiral galaxies, the best evidence for the existence of dark matter in galaxies. Alternatively, a minority of astronomers propose that a modification of the law of gravity may explain the observed rotation curve.[236]

Formation

Main article: Galaxy formation and evolution

History

The Milky Way began as one or several small overdensities in the mass distribution in the Universe shortly after the Big Bang 13.61 billion years ago.[237][238][239] Some of these overdensities were the seeds of globular clusters in which the oldest remaining stars in what is now the Milky Way formed. Nearly half the matter in the Milky Way may have come from other distant galaxies.[237] Nonetheless, these stars and clusters now comprise the stellar halo of the Milky Way. Within a few billion years of the birth of the first stars, the mass of the Milky Way was large enough so that it was spinning relatively quickly. Due to conservation of angular momentum, this led the gaseous interstellar medium to collapse from a roughly spheroidal shape to a disk. Therefore, later generations of stars formed in this spiral disk. Most younger stars, including the Sun, are observed to be in the disk.[240][241]

Since the first stars began to form, the Milky Way has grown through both galaxy mergers (particularly early in the Milky Way's growth) and accretion of gas directly from the Galactic halo.[241] The Milky Way is currently accreting material from several small galaxies, including two of its largest satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, through the Magellanic Stream. Direct accretion of gas is observed in high-velocity clouds like the Smith Cloud.[242][243] Cosmological simulations indicate that, 11 billion years ago, it merged with a particularly large galaxy that has been labeled the Kraken.[244][245] However, properties of the Milky Way such as stellar mass, angular momentum, and metallicity in its outermost regions suggest it has undergone no mergers with large galaxies in the last 10 billion years. This lack of recent major mergers is unusual among similar spiral galaxies; its neighbour the Andromeda Galaxy appears to have a more typical history shaped by more recent mergers with relatively large galaxies.[246][247]

According to recent studies, the Milky Way as well as the Andromeda Galaxy lie in what in the galaxy color–magnitude diagram is known as the "green valley", a region populated by galaxies in transition from the "blue cloud" (galaxies actively forming new stars) to the "red sequence" (galaxies that lack star formation). Star-formation activity in green valley galaxies is slowing as they run out of star-forming gas in the interstellar medium. In simulated galaxies with similar properties, star formation will typically have been extinguished within about five billion years from now, even accounting for the expected, short-term increase in the rate of star formation due to the collision between both the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy.[248] In fact, measurements of other galaxies similar to the Milky Way suggest it is among the reddest and brightest spiral galaxies that are still forming new stars and it is just slightly bluer than the bluest red sequence galaxies.[249]

Age and cosmological history

 
Comparison of the night sky with the night sky of a hypothetical planet within the Milky Way 10 billion years ago, at an age of about 3.6 billion years and 5 billion years before the Sun formed.[250]

Globular clusters are among the oldest objects in the Milky Way, which thus set a lower limit on the age of the Milky Way. The ages of individual stars in the Milky Way can be estimated by measuring the abundance of long-lived radioactive elements such as thorium-232 and uranium-238, then comparing the results to estimates of their original abundance, a technique called nucleocosmochronology. These yield values of about 12.5 ± 3 billion years for CS 31082-001[251] and 13.8 ± 4 billion years for BD +17° 3248.[252] Once a white dwarf is formed, it begins to undergo radiative cooling and the surface temperature steadily drops. By measuring the temperatures of the coolest of these white dwarfs and comparing them to their expected initial temperature, an age estimate can be made. With this technique, the age of the globular cluster M4 was estimated as 12.7 ± 0.7 billion years. Age estimates of the oldest of these clusters gives a best fit estimate of 12.6 billion years, and a 95% confidence upper limit of 16 billion years.[253]

In November 2018, astronomers reported the discovery of one of the oldest stars in the universe. About 13.5 billion-years-old, 2MASS J18082002-5104378 B is a tiny ultra metal-poor (UMP) star made almost entirely of materials released from the Big Bang, and is possibly one of the first stars. The discovery of the star in the Milky Way galaxy suggests that the galaxy may be at least 3 billion years older than previously thought.[254][255][256]

Several individual stars have been found in the Milky Way's halo with measured ages very close to the 13.80-billion-year age of the Universe. In 2007, a star in the galactic halo, HE 1523-0901, was estimated to be about 13.2 billion years old. As the oldest known object in the Milky Way at that time, this measurement placed a lower limit on the age of the Milky Way.[257] This estimate was made using the UV-Visual Echelle Spectrograph of the Very Large Telescope to measure the relative strengths of spectral lines caused by the presence of thorium and other elements created by the R-process. The line strengths yield abundances of different elemental isotopes, from which an estimate of the age of the star can be derived using nucleocosmochronology.[257] Another star, HD 140283, is 14.5 ± 0.7 billion years old.[42][258]

According to observations utilizing adaptive optics to correct for Earth's atmospheric distortion, stars in the galaxy's bulge date to about 12.8 billion years old.[259]

The age of stars in the galactic thin disk has also been estimated using nucleocosmochronology. Measurements of thin disk stars yield an estimate that the thin disk formed 8.8 ± 1.7 billion years ago. These measurements suggest there was a hiatus of almost 5 billion years between the formation of the galactic halo and the thin disk.[260] Recent analysis of the chemical signatures of thousands of stars suggests that stellar formation might have dropped by an order of magnitude at the time of disk formation, 10 to 8 billion years ago, when interstellar gas was too hot to form new stars at the same rate as before.[261]

The satellite galaxies surrounding the Milky way are not randomly distributed but seem to be the result of a break-up of some larger system producing a ring structure 500,000 light-years in diameter and 50,000 light-years wide.[262] Close encounters between galaxies, like that expected in 4 billion years with the Andromeda Galaxy rips off huge tails of gas, which, over time can coalesce to form dwarf galaxies in a ring at an arbitrary angle to the main disc.[263]

Intergalactic neighbourhood

 
Diagram of the galaxies in the Local Group relative to the Milky Way
 
The position of the Local Group within the Laniakea Supercluster
Main article: Local Group

The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are a binary system of giant spiral galaxies belonging to a group of 50 closely bound galaxies known as the Local Group, surrounded by a Local Void, itself being part of the Local Sheet[264] and in turn the Virgo Supercluster. Surrounding the Virgo Supercluster are a number of voids, devoid of many galaxies, the Microscopium Void to the "north", the Sculptor Void to the "left", the Boötes Void to the "right" and the Canes-Major Void to the "south". These voids change shape over time, creating filamentous structures of galaxies. The Virgo Supercluster, for instance, is being drawn towards the Great Attractor,[265] which in turn forms part of a greater structure, called Laniakea.[266]

Two smaller galaxies and a number of dwarf galaxies in the Local Group orbit the Milky Way. The largest of these is the Large Magellanic Cloud with a diameter of 32,200 light-years.[267] It has a close companion, the Small Magellanic Cloud. The Magellanic Stream is a stream of neutral hydrogen gas extending from these two small galaxies across 100° of the sky. The stream is thought to have been dragged from the Magellanic Clouds in tidal interactions with the Milky Way.[268] Some of the dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way are Canis Major Dwarf (the closest), Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, Ursa Minor Dwarf, Sculptor Dwarf, Sextans Dwarf, Fornax Dwarf, and Leo I Dwarf. The smallest dwarf galaxies of the Milky Way are only 500 light-years in diameter. These include Carina Dwarf, Draco Dwarf, and Leo II Dwarf. There may still be undetected dwarf galaxies that are dynamically bound to the Milky Way, which is supported by the detection of nine new satellites of the Milky Way in a relatively small patch of the night sky in 2015.[269] There are also some dwarf galaxies that have already been absorbed by the Milky Way, such as the progenitor of Omega Centauri.[270]

In 2014 researchers reported that most satellite galaxies of the Milky Way lie in a very large disk and orbit in the same direction.[271] This came as a surprise: according to standard cosmology, the satellite galaxies should form in dark matter halos, and they should be widely distributed and moving in random directions. This discrepancy is still not fully explained.[272]

In January 2006, researchers reported that the heretofore unexplained warp in the disk of the Milky Way has now been mapped and found to be a ripple or vibration set up by the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds as they orbit the Milky Way, causing vibrations when they pass through its edges. Previously, these two galaxies, at around 2% of the mass of the Milky Way, were considered too small to influence the Milky Way. However, in a computer model, the movement of these two galaxies creates a dark matter wake that amplifies their influence on the larger Milky Way.[273]

Current measurements suggest the Andromeda Galaxy is approaching us at 100 to 140 km/s (220,000 to 310,000 mph). In 4.3 billion years, there may be an Andromeda–Milky Way collision, depending on the importance of unknown lateral components to the galaxies' relative motion. If they collide, the chance of individual stars colliding with each other is extremely low,[274] but instead the two galaxies will merge to form a single elliptical galaxy or perhaps a large disk galaxy[275] over the course of about six billion years.[276]

Velocity

Although special relativity states that there is no "preferred" inertial frame of reference in space with which to compare the Milky Way, the Milky Way does have a velocity with respect to cosmological frames of reference.

One such frame of reference is the Hubble flow, the apparent motions of galaxy clusters due to the expansion of space. Individual galaxies, including the Milky Way, have peculiar velocities relative to the average flow. Thus, to compare the Milky Way to the Hubble flow, one must consider a volume large enough so that the expansion of the Universe dominates over local, random motions. A large enough volume means that the mean motion of galaxies within this volume is equal to the Hubble flow. Astronomers believe the Milky Way is moving at approximately 630 km/s (1,400,000 mph) with respect to this local co-moving frame of reference.[277][278] The Milky Way is moving in the general direction of the Great Attractor and other galaxy clusters, including the Shapley Supercluster, behind it.[279] The Local Group (a cluster of gravitationally bound galaxies containing, among others, the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy) is part of a supercluster called the Local Supercluster, centered near the Virgo Cluster: although they are moving away from each other at 967 km/s (2,160,000 mph) as part of the Hubble flow, this velocity is less than would be expected given the 16.8 million pc distance due to the gravitational attraction between the Local Group and the Virgo Cluster.[280]

Another reference frame is provided by the cosmic microwave background (CMB), in which the CMB temperature is least distorted by Doppler shift (zero dipole moment). The Milky Way is moving at 552 ± 6 km/s (1,235,000 ± 13,000 mph)[17] with respect to this frame, toward 10.5 right ascension, −24° declination (J2000 epoch, near the center of Hydra). This motion is observed by satellites such as the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) as a dipole contribution to the CMB, as photons in equilibrium in the CMB frame get blue-shifted in the direction of the motion and red-shifted in the opposite direction.[17]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ The distance towards its center (Sagittarius A*).
  2. ^ Some authors use the term Milky Way to refer exclusively to the band of light that the galaxy forms in the night sky, while the galaxy receives the full name Milky Way Galaxy. See for example Lausten et al.,[19] Pasachoff,[20] Jones,[21] van der Kruit,[22] and Hodge et al.[23]
  3. ^ See also Bortle Dark-Sky Scale.
  4. ^ The bright center of the galaxy is located in the constellation Sagittarius. From Sagittarius, the hazy band of white light appears to pass westward through the constellations of Scorpius, Ara, Norma, Triangulum Australe, Circinus, Centaurus, Musca, Crux, Carina, Vela, Puppis, Canis Major, Monoceros, Orion and Gemini, Taurus, to the galactic anticenter in Auriga. From there, it passes through Perseus, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Cepheus and Lacerta, Cygnus, Vulpecula, Sagitta, Aquila, Ophiuchus, Scutum, and back to Sagittarius.
  5. ^ These estimates are very uncertain, as most non-star objects are difficult to detect; for example, black hole estimates range from ten million to one billion.[146][147]
  6. ^ Karachentsev et al. give a blue absolute magnitude of −20.8. Combined with a color index of 0.55 estimated here, an absolute visual magnitude of −21.35 (−20.8 − 0.55 = −21.35) is obtained. Note that determining the absolute magnitude of the Milky Way is very difficult, because Earth is inside it.
  7. ^ For a photo see: "Sagittarius A*: Milky Way monster stars in cosmic reality show". Chandra X-ray Observatory. Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. January 6, 2003. from the original on March 17, 2008. Retrieved May 20, 2012.

References

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    • On page 57 November 20, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, Wright stated that despite their mutual gravitational attraction, the stars in the constellations don't collide because they are in orbit, so centrifugal force keeps them separated: " … centrifugal force, which not only preserves them in their orbits, but prevents them from rushing all together, by the common universal law of gravity, … "
    • On page 48 November 20, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, Wright stated that the form of the Milky Way is a ring: " … the stars are not infinitely dispersed and distributed in a promiscuous manner throughout all the mundane space, without order or design, … this phænomenon [is] no other than a certain effect arising from the observer's situation, … To a spectator placed in an indefinite space, … it [i.e. the Milky Way (Via Lactea)] [is] a vast ring of stars … "
    • On page 65 November 20, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, Wright speculated that the central body of the Milky Way, around which the rest of the galaxy revolves, might not be visible to us: " ... the central body A, being supposed as incognitum [i.e. an unknown], without [i.e. outside of] the finite view; ... "
    • On page 73 November 20, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, Wright called the Milky Way the Vortex Magnus (the great whirlpool) and estimated its diameter to be 8.64×1012 miles (13.9×1012 km).
    • On page 33 November 20, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, Wright speculated that there are a vast number of inhabited planets in the galaxy: " … ; therefore we may justly suppose, that so many radiant bodies [i.e. stars] were not created barely to enlighten an infinite void, but to … display an infinite shapeless universe, crowded with myriads of glorious worlds, all variously revolving round them; and … with an inconceivable variety of beings and states, animate … "
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  78. ^ Kant (1755), pages xxxiii–xxxvi of the Preface (Vorrede): November 20, 2016, at the Wayback Machine "Ich betrachtete die Art neblichter Sterne, deren Herr von Maupertuis in der Abhandlung von der Figur der Gestirne gedenket, und die die Figur von mehr oder weniger offenen Ellipsen vorstellen, und versicherte mich leicht, daß sie nichts anders als eine Häufung vieler Fixsterne seyn können. Die jederzeit abgemessene Rundung dieser Figuren belehrte mich, daß hier ein unbegreiflich zahlreiches Sternenheer, und zwar um einen gemeinschaftlichen Mittelpunkt, müste geordnet seyn, weil sonst ihre freye Stellungen gegen einander, wohl irreguläre Gestalten, aber nicht abgemessene Figuren vorstellen würden. Ich sahe auch ein: daß sie in dem System, darinn sie sich vereinigt befinden, vornemlich auf eine Fläche beschränkt seyn müßten, weil sie nicht zirkelrunde, sondern elliptische Figuren abbilden, und daß sie wegen ihres blassen Lichts unbegreiflich weit von uns abstehen." (I considered the type of nebulous stars, which Mr. de Maupertuis considered in his treatise on the shape of stars, and which present the figures of more or less open ellipses, and I readily assured myself, that they could be nothing else than a cluster of fixed stars. That these figures always measured round informed me that here an inconceivably numerous host of stars, [which were clustered] around a common center, must be orderly, because otherwise their free positions among each other would probably present irregular forms, not measurable figures. I also realized: that in the system in which they find themselves bound, they must be restricted primarily to a plane, because they display not circular, but elliptical figures, and that on account of their faint light, they are located inconceivably far from us.)
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  80. ^ The term Weltinsel (island universe) appears nowhere in Kant's book of 1755. The term first appeared in 1850, in the third volume of von Humboldt's Kosmos: Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos, vol. 3 (Stuttgart & Tübingen, (Germany): J.G. Cotta, 1850), pp. 187, 189. From p. 187: November 20, 2016, at the Wayback Machine "Thomas Wright von Durham, Kant, Lambert und zuerst auch William Herschel waren geneigt die Gestalt der Milchstraße und die scheinbare Anhäufung der Sterne in derselben als eine Folge der abgeplatteten Gestalt und ungleichen Dimensionen der Weltinsel (Sternschict) zu betrachten, in welche unser Sonnensystem eingeschlossen ist." (Thomas Wright of Durham, Kant, Lambert and first of all also William Herschel were inclined to regard the shape of the Milky Way and the apparent clustering of stars in it as a consequence of the oblate shape and unequal dimensions of the world island (star stratum), in which our solar system is included.)
    In the English translation – Alexander von Humboldt with E.C. Otté, trans., Cosmos ... (New York City: Harper & Brothers, 1897), vols. 3–5. see p. 147 November 6, 2018, at the Wayback Machine.
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  83. ^ See:
    • Rosse revealed the spiral structure of Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) at the 1845 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Rosse's illustration of M51 was reproduced in J.P. Nichol's book of 1846.
    • Rosse, Earl of (1846). "On the nebula 25 Herschel, or 61 [should read: 51] of Messier's catalogue". Report of the Fifteenth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; Held at Cambridge in June 1845 § Notices and Abstracts of Miscellaneous Communications to the Sections. Report of the ... Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1833): 4.
    • Nichol, John Pringle (1846). Thoughts on Some Important Points Relating to the System of the World. Edinburgh, Scotland: William Tait. p. 23. Rosse's illustration of the Whirlpool Galaxy appears on the plate that immediately precedes p. 23.
    • South, James (1846). "Auszug aus einem Berichte über Lord Rosse's grosses Telescop, den Sir James South in The Times, Nr. 18899, 1845 April 16 bekannt gemacht hat" [Excerpt from a report about Lord Rosse's great telescope, which Sir James South made known in The Times [of London], no. 18,899, 1845 April 16]. Astronomische Nachrichten. 23 (536): 113–118. doi:10.1002/asna.18460230802. On March 5, 1845, Rosse observed M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. From column 115: "The most popularly known nebulæ observed this night were the ring nebulæ in the Canes Venatici, or the 51st of Messier's catalogue, which was resolved into stars with a magnifying power of 548; … "
    • Robinson, T. R. (1845). "On Lord Rosse's telescope". Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 3 (50): 114–133. Rosse's early observations of nebulae and galaxies are discussed on pp. 127–130.
    • Rosse, The Earl of (1850). "Observations on the nebulae". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. 140: 499–514. doi:10.1098/rstl.1850.0026. Rosse's illustrations of nebulae and galaxies appear on the plates that immediately precede the article.
    • Bailey, M. E.; Butler, C.J.; McFarland, J. (April 2005). "Unwinding the discovery of spiral nebulae". Astronomy & Geophysics. 46 (2): 2.26–2.28. doi:10.1111/j.1468-4004.2005.46226.x.
  84. ^ See:
    • Kapteyn, Jacobus Cornelius (1906). "Statistical methods in stellar astronomy". In Rogers, Howard J. (ed.). Congress of Arts and Science, Universal Exposition, St. Louis, 1904. Vol. 4. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co. pp. 396–425. From pp. 419–420: "It follows that the one set of the stars must have a systematic motion relative to the other. … these two main directions of motion must be in reality diametrically opposite."
    • Kapteyn, J.C. (1905). "Star streaming". Report of the Seventy-fifth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, South Africa. Report of the ... Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1833): 257–265.
  85. ^ See:
    • Schwarzschild, K. (1907). "Ueber die Eigenbewegungen der Fixsterne" [On the proper motions of the fixed stars]. Nachrichten von der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (Reports of the Royal Society of Science at Göttingen) (in German). 5: 614–632. Bibcode:1907NWGot...5..614S.
    • Schwarzschild, K. (1908). "Ueber die Bestimmung von Vertex und Apex nach der Ellipsoidhypothese aus einer geringeren Anzahl beobachteter Eigenbewegungen" [On the determination, according to the ellipsoid hypothesis, of the vertex and apex from a small number of observed proper motions]. Nachrichten von der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (in German): 191–200.
  86. ^ Curtis, Heber D. (1917). "Novae in spiral nebulae and the island universe theory". Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. 29 (171): 206–207. Bibcode:1917PASP...29..206C. doi:10.1086/122632.
  87. ^ Curtis, H. D. (1988). "Novae in spiral nebulae and the Island Universe Theory". Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. 100: 6–7. Bibcode:1988PASP..100....6C. doi:10.1086/132128.
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January 26, 2023
milky, this, article, about, galaxy, other, uses, disambiguation, galaxy, that, includes, solar, system, with, name, describing, galaxy, appearance, from, earth, hazy, band, light, seen, night, formed, from, stars, that, cannot, individually, distinguished, na. This article is about the galaxy For other uses see Milky Way disambiguation The Milky Way b is the galaxy that includes the Solar System with the name describing the galaxy s appearance from Earth a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye The term Milky Way is a translation of the Latin via lactea from the Greek galaktikos kyklos galaktikos kyklos meaning milky circle 24 25 From Earth the Milky Way appears as a band because its disk shaped structure is viewed from within Galileo Galilei first resolved the band of light into individual stars with his telescope in 1610 Until the early 1920s most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the Universe 26 Following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Doust Curtis 27 observations by Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies Milky WayThe Galactic Center as seen from Earth s night sky the laser creates a guide star for the telescope Observation data J2000 epoch ConstellationSagittariusRight ascension17h 45m 40 03599s 1 Declination 29 00 28 1699 1 Distance7 935 8 277 kpc 25 881 26 996 ly 2 3 4 a CharacteristicsTypeSb Sbc SB rs bc 5 6 Mass1 15 1012 7 M Number of stars100 500 billion 1 4 1011 10 11 Size26 8 1 1 kpc 87 400 3 590 ly radius 25 0 mag arcsec2 B band isophote 8 9 Thickness of thin disk220 450 pc 718 1 470 ly 12 Thickness of thick disk2 6 0 5 kpc 8 500 1 600 ly 12 Angular momentum 1 1067 J s 13 Sun s Galactic rotation period212 Myr 14 Spiral pattern rotation period220 360 Myr 15 Bar pattern rotation period160 180 Myr 16 Speed relative to CMB rest frame552 2 5 5 km s 17 Escape velocity at Sun s position550 km s 18 Dark matter density at Sun s position0 0088 0 0024 0 0018 M pc 3 0 35 0 08 0 07 GeV cm 3 18 The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with an estimated D25 isophotal diameter of 26 8 1 1 kiloparsecs 87 400 3 590 light years 8 but only about 1 000 light years thick at the spiral arms more at the bulge Recent simulations suggest that a dark matter area also containing some visible stars may extend up to a diameter of almost 2 million light years 613 kpc 28 29 The Milky Way has several satellite galaxies and is part of the Local Group of galaxies which form part of the Virgo Supercluster which is itself a component of the Laniakea Supercluster 30 31 It is estimated to contain 100 400 billion stars 32 33 and at least that number of planets 34 35 The Solar System is located at a radius of about 27 000 light years 8 3 kpc from the Galactic Center 36 on the inner edge of the Orion Arm one of the spiral shaped concentrations of gas and dust The stars in the innermost 10 000 light years form a bulge and one or more bars that radiate from the bulge The Galactic Center is an intense radio source known as Sagittarius A a supermassive black hole of 4 100 0 034 million solar masses 37 38 Stars and gases at a wide range of distances from the Galactic Center orbit at approximately 220 kilometers per second The constant rotational speed appears to contradict the laws of Keplerian dynamics and suggests that much about 90 39 40 of the mass of the Milky Way is invisible to telescopes neither emitting nor absorbing electromagnetic radiation This conjectural mass has been termed dark matter 41 The rotational period is about 212 million years at the radius of the Sun 14 The Milky Way as a whole is moving at a velocity of approximately 600 km per second with respect to extragalactic frames of reference The oldest stars in the Milky Way are nearly as old as the Universe itself and thus probably formed shortly after the Dark Ages of the Big Bang 42 Contents 1 Etymology and mythology 2 Appearance 3 Astronomical history 4 Astrography 4 1 Sun s location and neighborhood 4 2 Galactic quadrants 5 Size and mass 5 1 Size 5 2 Mass 6 Contents 7 Structure 7 1 Galactic Center 7 1 1 Gamma rays and x rays 7 2 Spiral arms 7 3 Halo 7 3 1 Gaseous halo 7 4 Galactic rotation 8 Formation 8 1 History 8 2 Age and cosmological history 9 Intergalactic neighbourhood 10 Velocity 11 See also 12 Notes 13 References 14 Further reading 15 External linksEtymology and mythology Edit The Origin of the Milky Way by Tintoretto circa 1575 1580 Main articles List of names for the Milky Way and Milky Way mythology In the Babylonian epic poem Enuma Elis the Milky Way is created from the severed tail of the primeval salt water dragoness Tiamat set in the sky by Marduk the Babylonian national god after slaying her 43 44 This story was once thought to have been based on an older Sumerian version in which Tiamat is instead slain by Enlil of Nippur 45 46 but is now thought to be purely an invention of Babylonian propagandists with the intention to show Marduk as superior to the Sumerian deities 46 In Greek mythology Zeus places his son born by a mortal woman the infant Heracles on Hera s breast while she is asleep so the baby will drink her divine milk and thus become immortal Hera wakes up while breastfeeding and then realizes she is nursing an unknown baby she pushes the baby away some of her milk spills and it produces the band of light known as the Milky Way In another Greek story the abandoned Heracles is given by Athena to Hera for feeding but Heracles forcefulness causes Athena to rip him from her breast in pain 47 48 49 Llys Don literally The Court of Don is the traditional Welsh name for the constellation Cassiopeia At least three of Don s children also have astronomical associations Caer Gwydion The fortress of Gwydion is the traditional Welsh name for the Milky Way 50 51 and Caer Arianrhod The Fortress of Arianrhod being the constellation of Corona Borealis 52 53 In western culture the name Milky Way is derived from its appearance as a dim un resolved milky glowing band arching across the night sky The term is a translation of the Classical Latin via lactea in turn derived from the Hellenistic Greek gala3ias short for gala3ias kyklos galaxias kyklos meaning milky circle The Ancient Greek gala3ias galaxias from root galakt gala milk ias forming adjectives is also the root of galaxy the name for our and later all such collections of stars 24 54 55 The Milky Way or milk circle was just one of 11 circles the Greeks identified in the sky others being the zodiac the meridian the horizon the equator the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn the Arctic Circle and the Antarctic Circle and two colure circles passing through both poles 56 A view of the Milky Way toward the constellation Sagittarius including the Galactic Center as seen from a dark site with little light pollution the Black Rock Desert Nevada the bright object on the lower right is Jupiter just above AntaresAppearance Edit source source source source source source source source source source source source source source source source A time lapse video capturing the Milky Way arching over ALMA The Milky Way is visible as a hazy band of white light some 30 wide arching the night sky 57 Although all the individual naked eye stars in the entire sky are part of the Milky Way Galaxy the term Milky Way is limited to this band of light 58 59 The light originates from the accumulation of unresolved stars and other material located in the direction of the galactic plane Brighter regions around the band appear as soft visual patches known as star clouds The most conspicuous of these is the Large Sagittarius Star Cloud a portion of the central bulge of the galaxy 60 Dark regions within the band such as the Great Rift and the Coalsack are areas where interstellar dust blocks light from distant stars Peoples of the southern hemisphere including the Inca and Australian aborigines identified these regions as dark cloud constellations 61 The area of sky that the Milky Way obscures is called the Zone of Avoidance 62 The Milky Way has a relatively low surface brightness Its visibility can be greatly reduced by background light such as light pollution or moonlight The sky needs to be darker than about 20 2 magnitude per square arcsecond in order for the Milky Way to be visible 63 It should be visible if the limiting magnitude is approximately 5 1 or better and shows a great deal of detail at 6 1 64 This makes the Milky Way difficult to see from brightly lit urban or suburban areas but very prominent when viewed from rural areas when the Moon is below the horizon c Maps of artificial night sky brightness show that more than one third of Earth s population cannot see the Milky Way from their homes due to light pollution 65 As viewed from Earth the visible region of the Milky Way s galactic plane occupies an area of the sky that includes 30 constellations d The Galactic Center lies in the direction of Sagittarius where the Milky Way is brightest From Sagittarius the hazy band of white light appears to pass around to the galactic anticenter in Auriga The band then continues the rest of the way around the sky back to Sagittarius dividing the sky into two roughly equal hemispheres citation needed The galactic plane is inclined by about 60 to the ecliptic the plane of Earth s orbit Relative to the celestial equator it passes as far north as the constellation of Cassiopeia and as far south as the constellation of Crux indicating the high inclination of Earth s equatorial plane and the plane of the ecliptic relative to the galactic plane The north galactic pole is situated at right ascension 12h 49m declination 27 4 B1950 near b Comae Berenices and the south galactic pole is near a Sculptoris Because of this high inclination depending on the time of night and year the Milky Way arch may appear relatively low or relatively high in the sky For observers from latitudes approximately 65 north to 65 south the Milky Way passes directly overhead twice a day citation needed The Milky Way arching at a high inclination across the night sky this composited panorama was taken at Paranal Observatory in northern Chile the Magellanic Clouds can be seen on the left the bright object near top center is Jupiter in the constellation Sagittarius and the orange glow at the horizon on the right is Antofagasta city with a jet trail above it galactic north is downward The Milky Way viewed at different wavelengthsAstronomical history EditSee also Galaxy Observation history The shape of the Milky Way as deduced from star counts by William Herschel in 1785 the Solar System was assumed near center In Meteorologica Aristotle 384 322 BC states that the Greek philosophers Anaxagoras c 500 428 BC and Democritus 460 370 BC proposed that the Milky Way is the glow of stars not directly visible due to Earth s shadow while other stars receive their light from the Sun but have their glow obscured by solar rays 66 Aristotle himself believed that the Milky Way was part of the Earth s upper atmosphere along with the stars and that it was a byproduct of stars burning that did not dissipate because of its outermost location in the atmosphere composing its great circle He also said that the Milky appearance of the Milky Way galaxy was due to the refraction of the earth s atmosphere 67 68 69 The Neoplatonist philosopher Olympiodorus the Younger c 495 570 AD criticized this view arguing that if the Milky Way were sublunary it should appear different at different times and places on Earth and that it should have parallax which it does not In his view the Milky Way is celestial This idea would be influential later in the Muslim world 70 The Persian astronomer Al Biruni 973 1048 proposed that the Milky Way is a collection of countless fragments of the nature of nebulous stars 71 The Andalusian astronomer Avempace d 1138 proposed the Milky Way to be made up of many stars but appears to be a continuous image in the Earth s atmosphere citing his observation of a conjunction of Jupiter and Mars in 1106 or 1107 as evidence 68 The Persian astronomer Nasir al Din al Tusi 1201 1274 in his Tadhkira wrote The Milky Way i e the Galaxy is made up of a very large number of small tightly clustered stars which on account of their concentration and smallness seem to be cloudy patches Because of this it was likened to milk in color 72 Ibn Qayyim al Jawziyya 1292 1350 proposed that the Milky Way is a myriad of tiny stars packed together in the sphere of the fixed stars 73 Proof of the Milky Way consisting of many stars came in 1610 when Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study the Milky Way and discovered that it is composed of a huge number of faint stars Galileo also concluded that the appearance of the Milky Way was due to refraction of the Earth s atmosphere 74 75 67 In a treatise in 1755 Immanuel Kant drawing on earlier work by Thomas Wright 76 speculated correctly that the Milky Way might be a rotating body of a huge number of stars held together by gravitational forces akin to the Solar System but on much larger scales 77 The resulting disk of stars would be seen as a band on the sky from our perspective inside the disk Wright and Kant also conjectured that some of the nebulae visible in the night sky might be separate galaxies themselves similar to our own Kant referred to both the Milky Way and the extragalactic nebulae as island universes a term still current up to the 1930s 78 79 80 The first attempt to describe the shape of the Milky Way and the position of the Sun within it was carried out by William Herschel in 1785 by carefully counting the number of stars in different regions of the visible sky He produced a diagram of the shape of the Milky Way with the Solar System close to the center 81 In 1845 Lord Rosse constructed a new telescope and was able to distinguish between elliptical and spiral shaped nebulae He also managed to make out individual point sources in some of these nebulae lending credence to Kant s earlier conjecture 82 83 Photograph of the Great Andromeda Nebula from 1899 later identified as the Andromeda Galaxy In 1904 studying the proper motions of stars Jacobus Kapteyn reported that these were not random as it was believed in that time stars could be divided into two streams moving in nearly opposite directions 84 It was later realized that Kapteyn s data had been the first evidence of the rotation of our galaxy 85 which ultimately led to the finding of galactic rotation by Bertil Lindblad and Jan Oort citation needed In 1917 Heber Curtis had observed the nova S Andromedae within the Great Andromeda Nebula Messier object 31 Searching the photographic record he found 11 more novae Curtis noticed that these novae were on average 10 magnitudes fainter than those that occurred within the Milky Way As a result he was able to come up with a distance estimate of 150 000 parsecs He became a proponent of the island universes hypothesis which held that the spiral nebulae were independent galaxies 86 87 In 1920 the Great Debate took place between Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis concerning the nature of the Milky Way spiral nebulae and the dimensions of the Universe To support his claim that the Great Andromeda Nebula is an external galaxy Curtis noted the appearance of dark lanes resembling the dust clouds in the Milky Way as well as the significant Doppler shift 88 The controversy was conclusively settled by Edwin Hubble in the early 1920s using the Mount Wilson observatory 2 5 m 100 in Hooker telescope With the light gathering power of this new telescope he was able to produce astronomical photographs that resolved the outer parts of some spiral nebulae as collections of individual stars He was also able to identify some Cepheid variables that he could use as a benchmark to estimate the distance to the nebulae He found that the Andromeda Nebula is 275 000 parsecs from the Sun far too distant to be part of the Milky Way 89 90 Astrography Edit Map of the Milky Way Galaxy with the constellations that cross the galactic plane in each direction and the known prominent components annotated including main arms spurs bar nucleus bulge notable nebulae and globular clusters An all sky view of stars in the Milky Way and neighbouring galaxies based on the first year of observations from Gaia satellite from July 2014 to September 2015 The map shows the density of stars in each portion of the sky Brighter regions indicate denser concentrations of stars Darker regions across the Galactic Plane correspond to dense clouds of interstellar gas and dust that absorb starlight The ESA spacecraft Gaia provides distance estimates by determining the parallax of a billion stars and is mapping the Milky Way with four planned releases of maps in 2016 2018 2021 and 2024 91 92 Data from Gaia has been described as transformational It has been estimated that Gaia has expanded the number of observations of stars from about 2 million stars as of the 1990s to 2 billion It has expanded the measurable volume of space by a factor of 100 in radius and a factor of 1 000 in precision 93 A study in 2020 concluded that Gaia detected a wobbling motion of the galaxy which might be caused by torques from a misalignment of the disc s rotation axis with respect to the principal axis of a non spherical halo or from accreted matter in the halo acquired during late infall or from nearby interacting satellite galaxies and their consequent tides 94 Sun s location and neighborhood Edit See also Location of Earth Diagram of the Milky Way with the position of the Solar System marked by a yellow arrow and a red dot in the Orion Arm The dot roughly covers the larger surroundings of the Solar System the space between the Radcliffe wave and Split linear structures formerly the Gould Belt 95 Artistic close up of the Orion Arm with the main features of the Radcliffe Wave and Split linear structures and with the Solar System surrounded by the closest large scale celestial features at the surface of the Local Bubble at a distance of 400 500 light years The Sun is near the inner rim of the Orion Arm within the Local Fluff of the Local Bubble between the Radcliffe wave and Split linear structures formerly Gould Belt 95 Based upon studies of stellar orbits around Sgr A by Gillessen et al 2016 the Sun lies at an estimated distance of 27 14 0 46 kly 8 32 0 14 kpc 36 from the Galactic Center Boehle et al 2016 found a smaller value of 25 64 0 46 kly 7 86 0 14 kpc also using a star orbit analysis 96 The Sun is currently 5 30 parsecs 16 98 ly above or north of the central plane of the Galactic disk 97 The distance between the local arm and the next arm out the Perseus Arm is about 2 000 parsecs 6 500 ly 98 The Sun and thus the Solar System is located in the Milky Way s galactic habitable zone 99 100 There are about 208 stars brighter than absolute magnitude 8 5 within a sphere with a radius of 15 parsecs 49 ly from the Sun giving a density of one star per 69 cubic parsecs or one star per 2 360 cubic light years from List of nearest bright stars On the other hand there are 64 known stars of any magnitude not counting 4 brown dwarfs within 5 parsecs 16 ly of the Sun giving a density of about one star per 8 2 cubic parsecs or one per 284 cubic light years from List of nearest stars This illustrates the fact that there are far more faint stars than bright stars in the entire sky there are about 500 stars brighter than apparent magnitude 4 but 15 5 million stars brighter than apparent magnitude 14 101 The apex of the Sun s way or the solar apex is the direction that the Sun travels through space in the Milky Way The general direction of the Sun s Galactic motion is towards the star Vega near the constellation of Hercules at an angle of roughly 60 sky degrees to the direction of the Galactic Center The Sun s orbit about the Milky Way is expected to be roughly elliptical with the addition of perturbations due to the Galactic spiral arms and non uniform mass distributions In addition the Sun passes through the Galactic plane approximately 2 7 times per orbit 102 This is very similar to how a simple harmonic oscillator works with no drag force damping term These oscillations were until recently thought to coincide with mass lifeform extinction periods on Earth 103 A reanalysis of the effects of the Sun s transit through the spiral structure based on CO data has failed to find a correlation 104 It takes the Solar System about 240 million years to complete one orbit of the Milky Way a galactic year 105 so the Sun is thought to have completed 18 20 orbits during its lifetime and 1 1250 of a revolution since the origin of humans The orbital speed of the Solar System about the center of the Milky Way is approximately 220 km s 490 000 mph or 0 073 of the speed of light The Sun moves through the heliosphere at 84 000 km h 52 000 mph At this speed it takes around 1 400 years for the Solar System to travel a distance of 1 light year or 8 days to travel 1 AU astronomical unit 106 The Solar System is headed in the direction of the zodiacal constellation Scorpius which follows the ecliptic 107 Galactic quadrants Edit Main article Galactic quadrant Diagram of the Sun s location in the Milky Way the angles represent longitudes in the galactic coordinate system A galactic quadrant or quadrant of the Milky Way refers to one of four circular sectors in the division of the Milky Way In astronomical practice the delineation of the galactic quadrants is based upon the galactic coordinate system which places the Sun as the origin of the mapping system 108 Quadrants are described using ordinals for example 1st galactic quadrant 109 second galactic quadrant 110 or third quadrant of the Milky Way 111 Viewing from the north galactic pole with 0 zero degrees as the ray that runs starting from the Sun and through the Galactic Center the quadrants are Galacticquadrant Galacticlongitude ℓ Reference 1st 0 ℓ 90 112 2nd 90 ℓ 180 110 3rd 180 ℓ 270 111 4th 270 ℓ 360 360 0 109 dd with the galactic longitude ℓ increasing in the counter clockwise direction positive rotation as viewed from north of the Galactic Center a view point several hundred thousand light years distant from Earth in the direction of the constellation Coma Berenices if viewed from south of the Galactic Center a view point similarly distant in the constellation Sculptor ℓ would increase in the clockwise direction negative rotation Size and mass Edit The structure of the Milky Way is thought to be similar to this galaxy UGC 12158 imaged by Hubble Size Edit A size comparison of the six largest galaxies of the Local Group together with the Milky Way The Milky Way is one of the two largest galaxies in the Local Group the other being the Andromeda Galaxy although the size for its galactic disc and how much it defines the isophotal diameter is not well understood 113 It is estimated that the significant bulk of stars in the galaxy lies within the 26 kiloparsecs 80 000 light years diameter and that the number of stars beyond the outermost disc dramatically reduces to a very low number with respect to an extrapolation of the exponential disk with the scale length of the inner disc 114 113 There are several methods being used in astronomy in defining the size of a galaxy and each of them can yield different results with respect to one another The most commonly employed method is the D25 standard the isophote where the photometric brightness of a galaxy in the B band 445 nm wavelength of light in the blue part of the visible spectrum reaches 25 mag arcsec2 115 An estimate from 1997 by Goodwin and others compared the distribution of Cepheid variable stars in 17 other spiral galaxies to the ones in the Milky Way and modelling the relationship to their surface brightnesses This gave an isophotal diameter for the Milky Way at 26 8 1 1 kiloparsecs 87 400 3 590 light years by assuming that the galactic disc is well represented by an exponential disc and adopting a central surface brightness of the galaxy µ0 of 22 1 0 3 B mag arcsec 2 and a disk scale length h of 5 0 0 5 kpc 16 000 1 600 ly 116 8 117 This is significantly smaller than the Andromeda Galaxy s isophotal diameter and slightly below the mean isophotal sizes of the galaxies being at 28 3 kpc 92 000 ly 8 The paper concludes that the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy were not overly large spiral galaxies and as well as one of the largest known if the former not being the largest as previously widely believed but rather average ordinary spiral galaxies 118 To compare the relative physical scale of the Milky Way if the Solar System out to Neptune were the size of a US quarter 24 3 mm 0 955 in the Milky Way would be approximately at least the greatest north south line of the contiguous United States 119 An even older study from 1978 gave a lower diameter for Milky Way about 23 kpc 75 000 ly 8 A 2015 paper discovered that there is a ring like filament of stars called Triangulum Andromeda Ring TriAnd Ring rippling above and below the relatively flat galactic plane which alongside Monoceros Ring were both suggested to be primarily the result of disk oscillations and wrapping around the Milky Way at a diameter of at least 50 kpc 160 000 ly 120 which may be part of the Milky Way s outer disk itself hence making the stellar disk larger by increasing to this size 121 However a more recent 2018 paper later somewhat ruled out this hypothesis and supported a conclusion that the Monoceros Ring A13 and TriAnd Ring were stellar overdensities rather kicked out from the main stellar disk with the velocity dispersion of the RR Lyrae stars found to be higher and consistent with halo membership 122 Another 2018 study revealed the very probable presence of disk stars at 26 31 5 kpc 84 800 103 000 ly from the Galactic Center or perhaps even farther significantly beyond approximately 13 20 kpc 40 000 70 000 ly in which it was once believed to be the abrupt drop off of the stellar density of the disk meaning that few or no stars were expected to be above this limit save for stars that belong to the old population of the galactic halo 113 123 124 A 2020 study predicted the edge of the Milky Way s dark matter halo being around 292 61 kpc 952 000 199 000 ly which translates to a diameter of 584 122 kpc 1 905 0 3979 Mly 28 29 The Milky Way s stellar disk is also estimated to be approximately up to 1 35 kpc 4 000 ly thick 125 126 A schematic profile of the Milky Way Abbreviations GNP GSP Galactic North and South Poles Mass Edit The Milky Way is approximately 890 billion to 1 54 trillion times the mass of the Sun in total 8 9 1011 to 1 54 1012 solar masses 39 40 127 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 The low end of the estimate range is 5 8 1011 solar masses M somewhat less than that of the Andromeda Galaxy 128 129 130 Measurements using the Very Long Baseline Array in 2009 found velocities as large as 254 km s 570 000 mph for stars at the outer edge of the Milky Way 131 Because the orbital velocity depends on the total mass inside the orbital radius this suggests that the Milky Way is more massive roughly equaling the mass of Andromeda Galaxy at 7 1011 M within 160 000 ly 49 kpc of its center 132 In 2010 a measurement of the radial velocity of halo stars found that the mass enclosed within 80 kiloparsecs is 7 1011 M 133 According to a study published in 2014 the mass of the entire Milky Way is estimated to be 8 5 1011 M 134 but this is only half the mass of the Andromeda Galaxy 134 A recent 2019 mass estimate for the Milky Way is 1 29 1012 M 135 Much of the mass of the Milky Way seems to be dark matter an unknown and invisible form of matter that interacts gravitationally with ordinary matter A dark matter halo is conjectured to spread out relatively uniformly to a distance beyond one hundred kiloparsecs kpc from the Galactic Center Mathematical models of the Milky Way suggest that the mass of dark matter is 1 1 5 1012 M 136 137 138 2013 and 2014 studies indicate a range in mass as large as 4 5 1012 M 139 and as small as 8 1011 M 140 By comparison the total mass of all the stars in the Milky Way is estimated to be between 4 6 1010 M 141 and 6 43 1010 M 136 In addition to the stars there is also interstellar gas comprising 90 hydrogen and 10 helium by mass 142 with two thirds of the hydrogen found in the atomic form and the remaining one third as molecular hydrogen 143 The mass of the Milky Way s interstellar gas is equal to between 10 143 and 15 142 of the total mass of its stars Interstellar dust accounts for an additional 1 of the total mass of the gas 142 In March 2019 astronomers reported that the virial mass of the Milky Way galaxy is 1 54 trillion solar masses within a radius of about 39 5 kpc 130 000 ly over twice as much as was determined in earlier studies and suggesting that about 90 of the mass of the galaxy is dark matter 39 40 Contents Edit 360 degree panorama view of the Milky Way an assembled mosaic of photographs by ESO the galactic centre is in the middle of the view with galactic north up 360 degree rendering of the Milky Way using Gaia EDR3 data showing interstellar gas dust backlit by stars main patches labeled in black white labels are main bright patches of stars Left hemisphere is facing the galactic center right hemisphere is facing the galactic anticenter The Milky Way contains between 100 and 400 billion stars 10 11 and at least that many planets 144 An exact figure would depend on counting the number of very low mass stars which are difficult to detect especially at distances of more than 300 ly 90 pc from the Sun As a comparison the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy contains an estimated one trillion 1012 stars 145 The Milky Way may contain ten billion white dwarfs a billion neutron stars and a hundred million stellar black holes e 148 149 Filling the space between the stars is a disk of gas and dust called the interstellar medium This disk has at least a comparable extent in radius to the stars 150 whereas the thickness of the gas layer ranges from hundreds of light years for the colder gas to thousands of light years for warmer gas 151 152 The disk of stars in the Milky Way does not have a sharp edge beyond which there are no stars Rather the concentration of stars decreases with distance from the center of the Milky Way For reasons that are not understood beyond a radius of roughly 40 000 light years 13 kpc from the center the number of stars per cubic parsec drops much faster with radius 114 Surrounding the galactic disk is a spherical galactic halo of stars and globular clusters that extends farther outward but is limited in size by the orbits of two Milky Way satellites the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds whose closest approach to the Galactic Center is about 180 000 ly 55 kpc 153 At this distance or beyond the orbits of most halo objects would be disrupted by the Magellanic Clouds Hence such objects would probably be ejected from the vicinity of the Milky Way The integrated absolute visual magnitude of the Milky Way is estimated to be around 20 9 154 155 f Both gravitational microlensing and planetary transit observations indicate that there may be at least as many planets bound to stars as there are stars in the Milky Way 34 156 and microlensing measurements indicate that there are more rogue planets not bound to host stars than there are stars 157 158 The Milky Way contains at least one planet per star resulting in 100 400 billion planets according to a January 2013 study of the five planet star system Kepler 32 by the Kepler space observatory 35 A different January 2013 analysis of Kepler data estimated that at least 17 billion Earth sized exoplanets reside in the Milky Way 159 On November 4 2013 astronomers reported based on Kepler space mission data that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun like stars and red dwarfs within the Milky Way 160 161 162 11 billion of these estimated planets may be orbiting Sun like stars 163 The nearest exoplanet may be 4 2 light years away orbiting the red dwarf Proxima Centauri according to a 2016 study 164 Such Earth sized planets may be more numerous than gas giants 34 though harder to detect at great distances given their small size Besides exoplanets exocomets comets beyond the Solar System have also been detected and may be common in the Milky Way 165 More recently in November 2020 over 300 million habitable exoplanets are estimated to exist in the Milky Way Galaxy 166 Structure Edit Overview of different elements of the overall structure of the Milky Way Supermassive black hole Sagittarius A imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope in radio waves The central dark spot is the black hole s shadow which is larger than the event horizon Bright X ray flares from Sagittarius A inset in the center of the Milky Way as detected by the Chandra X ray Observatory 167 source source source source source source source source source source source source Artist s impression of how the Milky Way would look from different vantage points from edge on lines of sight the peanut shell shaped structure not to be confused with the galaxy s central bulge is evident viewed from above the central narrow bar that is responsible for this structure appears clearly as would many spiral arms and their associated dust clouds The Milky Way consists of a bar shaped core region surrounded by a warped disk of gas dust and stars 168 169 The mass distribution within the Milky Way closely resembles the type Sbc in the Hubble classification which represents spiral galaxies with relatively loosely wound arms 5 Astronomers first began to conjecture that the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy rather than an ordinary spiral galaxy in the 1960s 170 171 172 These conjectures were confirmed by the Spitzer Space Telescope observations in 2005 that showed the Milky Way s central bar to be larger than previously thought 173 Galactic Center Edit Main article Galactic Center The Sun is 25 000 28 000 ly 7 7 8 6 kpc from the Galactic Center This value is estimated using geometric based methods or by measuring selected astronomical objects that serve as standard candles with different techniques yielding various values within this approximate range 174 96 36 175 176 177 In the inner few kiloparsecs around 10 000 light years radius is a dense concentration of mostly old stars in a roughly spheroidal shape called the bulge 178 It has been proposed that the Milky Way lacks a bulge due to a collision and merger between previous galaxies and that instead it only has a pseudobulge formed by its central bar 179 However confusion in the literature between the peanut shell shaped structure created by instabilities in the bar versus a possible bulge with an expected half light radius of 0 5 kpc abounds 180 The Galactic Center is marked by an intense radio source named Sagittarius A pronounced Sagittarius A star The motion of material around the center indicates that Sagittarius A harbors a massive compact object 181 This concentration of mass is best explained as a supermassive black hole g 174 182 SMBH with an estimated mass of 4 1 4 5 million times the mass of the Sun 182 The rate of accretion of the SMBH is consistent with an inactive galactic nucleus being estimated at 1 10 5 M per year 183 Observations indicate that there are SMBHs located near the center of most normal galaxies 184 185 The nature of the Milky Way s bar is actively debated with estimates for its half length and orientation spanning from 1 to 5 kpc 3 000 16 000 ly and 10 50 degrees relative to the line of sight from Earth to the Galactic Center 176 177 186 Certain authors advocate that the Milky Way features two distinct bars one nestled within the other 187 However RR Lyrae type stars do not trace a prominent Galactic bar 177 188 189 The bar may be surrounded by a ring called the 5 kpc ring that contains a large fraction of the molecular hydrogen present in the Milky Way as well as most of the Milky Way s star formation activity Viewed from the Andromeda Galaxy it would be the brightest feature of the Milky Way 190 X ray emission from the core is aligned with the massive stars surrounding the central bar 183 and the Galactic ridge 191 Gamma rays and x rays Edit Since 1970 various gamma ray detection missions have discovered 511 keV gamma rays coming from the general direction of the Galactic Center These gamma rays are produced by positrons antielectrons annihilating with electrons In 2008 it was found that the distribution of the sources of the gamma rays resembles the distribution of low mass X ray binaries seeming to indicate that these X ray binaries are sending positrons and electrons into interstellar space where they slow down and annihilate 192 193 194 The observations were both made by NASA and ESA s satellites In 1970 gamma ray detectors found that the emitting region was about 10 000 light years across with a luminosity of about 10 000 suns 193 Illustration of the two gigantic X ray gamma ray bubbles blue violet of the Milky Way center In 2010 two gigantic spherical bubbles of high energy gamma emission were detected to the north and the south of the Milky Way core using data from the Fermi Gamma ray Space Telescope The diameter of each of the bubbles is about 25 000 light years 7 7 kpc or about 1 4 of the galaxy s estimated diameter they stretch up to Grus and to Virgo on the night sky of the southern hemisphere 195 196 Subsequently observations with the Parkes Telescope at radio frequencies identified polarized emission that is associated with the Fermi bubbles These observations are best interpreted as a magnetized outflow driven by star formation in the central 640 ly 200 pc of the Milky Way 197 Later on January 5 2015 NASA reported observing an X ray flare 400 times brighter than usual a record breaker from Sagittarius A The unusual event may have been caused by the breaking apart of an asteroid falling into the black hole or by the entanglement of magnetic field lines within gas flowing into Sagittarius A 167 Spiral arms Edit Further information Spiral galaxy Outside the gravitational influence of the Galactic bar the structure of the interstellar medium and stars in the disk of the Milky Way is organized into four spiral arms 198 Spiral arms typically contain a higher density of interstellar gas and dust than the Galactic average as well as a greater concentration of star formation as traced by H II regions 199 200 and molecular clouds 201 The Milky Way s spiral structure is uncertain and there is currently no consensus on the nature of the Milky Way s arms 202 Perfect logarithmic spiral patterns only crudely describe features near the Sun 200 203 because galaxies commonly have arms that branch merge twist unexpectedly and feature a degree of irregularity 177 203 204 The possible scenario of the Sun within a spur Local arm 200 emphasizes that point and indicates that such features are probably not unique and exist elsewhere in the Milky Way 203 Estimates of the pitch angle of the arms range from about 7 to 25 150 205 There are thought to be four spiral arms that all start near the Milky Way Galaxy s center 206 These are named as follows with the positions of the arms shown in the image below Observed normal lines and extrapolated dotted lines structure of the spiral arms of the Milky Way viewed from north of the galaxy the galaxy rotates clockwise in this view The gray lines radiating from the Sun s position upper center list the three letter abbreviations of the corresponding constellations Color Arm s turquoise Near 3 kpc Arm and Perseus Armblue Norma and Outer arm Along with extension discovered in 2004 207 green Scutum Centaurus Armred Carina Sagittarius ArmThere are at least two smaller arms or spurs including orange Orion Cygnus Arm which contains the Sun and Solar System Spitzer reveals what cannot be seen in visible light cooler stars blue heated dust reddish hue and Sgr A as bright white spot in the middle Artist s conception of the spiral structure of the Milky Way with two major stellar arms and a bar 202 Two spiral arms the Scutum Centaurus arm and the Carina Sagittarius arm have tangent points inside the Sun s orbit about the center of the Milky Way If these arms contain an overdensity of stars compared to the average density of stars in the Galactic disk it would be detectable by counting the stars near the tangent point Two surveys of near infrared light which is sensitive primarily to red giants and not affected by dust extinction detected the predicted overabundance in the Scutum Centaurus arm but not in the Carina Sagittarius arm the Scutum Centaurus Arm contains approximately 30 more red giants than would be expected in the absence of a spiral arm 205 208 This observation suggests that the Milky Way possesses only two major stellar arms the Perseus arm and the Scutum Centaurus arm The rest of the arms contain excess gas but not excess old stars 202 In December 2013 astronomers found that the distribution of young stars and star forming regions matches the four arm spiral description of the Milky Way 209 210 211 Thus the Milky Way appears to have two spiral arms as traced by old stars and four spiral arms as traced by gas and young stars The explanation for this apparent discrepancy is unclear 211 Clusters detected by WISE used to trace the Milky Way s spiral arms The Near 3 kpc Arm also called the Expanding 3 kpc Arm or simply the 3 kpc Arm was discovered in the 1950s by astronomer van Woerden and collaborators through 21 centimeter radio measurements of HI atomic hydrogen 212 213 It was found to be expanding away from the central bulge at more than 50 km s It is located in the fourth galactic quadrant at a distance of about 5 2 kpc from the Sun and 3 3 kpc from the Galactic Center The Far 3 kpc Arm was discovered in 2008 by astronomer Tom Dame Center for Astrophysics Harvard amp Smithsonian It is located in the first galactic quadrant at a distance of 3 kpc about 10 000 ly from the Galactic Center 213 214 A simulation published in 2011 suggested that the Milky Way may have obtained its spiral arm structure as a result of repeated collisions with the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy 215 It has been suggested that the Milky Way contains two different spiral patterns an inner one formed by the Sagittarius arm that rotates fast and an outer one formed by the Carina and Perseus arms whose rotation velocity is slower and whose arms are tightly wound In this scenario suggested by numerical simulations of the dynamics of the different spiral arms the outer pattern would form an outer pseudoring 216 and the two patterns would be connected by the Cygnus arm 217 The long filamentary molecular cloud dubbed Nessie probably forms a dense spine of the Scutum Centarus Arm Outside of the major spiral arms is the Monoceros Ring or Outer Ring a ring of gas and stars torn from other galaxies billions of years ago However several members of the scientific community recently restated their position affirming the Monoceros structure is nothing more than an over density produced by the flared and warped thick disk of the Milky Way 218 The structure of the Milky Way s disk is warped along an S curve 219 Halo Edit The Galactic disk is surrounded by a spheroidal halo of old stars and globular clusters of which 90 lie within 100 000 light years 30 kpc of the Galactic Center 220 However a few globular clusters have been found farther such as PAL 4 and AM 1 at more than 200 000 light years from the Galactic Center About 40 of the Milky Way s clusters are on retrograde orbits which means they move in the opposite direction from the Milky Way rotation 221 The globular clusters can follow rosette orbits about the Milky Way in contrast to the elliptical orbit of a planet around a star 222 Although the disk contains dust that obscures the view in some wavelengths the halo component does not Active star formation takes place in the disk especially in the spiral arms which represent areas of high density but does not take place in the halo as there is little cool gas to collapse into stars 105 Open clusters are also located primarily in the disk 223 Discoveries in the early 21st century have added dimension to the knowledge of the Milky Way s structure With the discovery that the disk of the Andromeda Galaxy M31 extends much farther than previously thought 224 the possibility of the disk of the Milky Way extending farther is apparent and this is supported by evidence from the discovery of the Outer Arm extension of the Cygnus Arm 207 225 and of a similar extension of the Scutum Centaurus Arm 226 With the discovery of the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy came the discovery of a ribbon of galactic debris as the polar orbit of the dwarf and its interaction with the Milky Way tears it apart Similarly with the discovery of the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy it was found that a ring of galactic debris from its interaction with the Milky Way encircles the Galactic disk citation needed The Sloan Digital Sky Survey of the northern sky shows a huge and diffuse structure spread out across an area around 5 000 times the size of a full moon within the Milky Way that does not seem to fit within current models The collection of stars rises close to perpendicular to the plane of the spiral arms of the Milky Way The proposed likely interpretation is that a dwarf galaxy is merging with the Milky Way This galaxy is tentatively named the Virgo Stellar Stream and is found in the direction of Virgo about 30 000 light years 9 kpc away 227 Gaseous halo Edit In addition to the stellar halo the Chandra X ray Observatory XMM Newton and Suzaku have provided evidence that there is a gaseous halo with a large amount of hot gas The halo extends for hundreds of thousand of light years much farther than the stellar halo and close to the distance of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds The mass of this hot halo is nearly equivalent to the mass of the Milky Way itself 228 229 230 The temperature of this halo gas is between 1 and 2 5 million K 1 8 and 4 5 million F 231 Observations of distant galaxies indicate that the Universe had about one sixth as much baryonic ordinary matter as dark matter when it was just a few billion years old However only about half of those baryons are accounted for in the modern Universe based on observations of nearby galaxies like the Milky Way 232 If the finding that the mass of the halo is comparable to the mass of the Milky Way is confirmed it could be the identity of the missing baryons around the Milky Way 232 Galactic rotation Edit Galaxy rotation curve for the Milky Way vertical axis is speed of rotation about the galactic center horizontal axis is distance from the galactic center in kpcs the sun is marked with a yellow ball the observed curve of speed of rotation is blue the predicted curve based upon stellar mass and gas in the Milky Way is red scatter in observations roughly indicated by gray bars the difference is due to dark matter 41 233 234 The stars and gas in the Milky Way rotate about its center differentially meaning that the rotation period varies with location As is typical for spiral galaxies the orbital speed of most stars in the Milky Way does not depend strongly on their distance from the center Away from the central bulge or outer rim the typical stellar orbital speed is between 210 10 km s 470 000 22 000 mph 235 Hence the orbital period of the typical star is directly proportional only to the length of the path traveled This is unlike the situation within the Solar System where two body gravitational dynamics dominate and different orbits have significantly different velocities associated with them The rotation curve shown in the figure describes this rotation Toward the center of the Milky Way the orbit speeds are too low whereas beyond 7 kpcs the speeds are too high to match what would be expected from the universal law of gravitation citation needed If the Milky Way contained only the mass observed in stars gas and other baryonic ordinary matter the rotational speed would decrease with distance from the center However the observed curve is relatively flat indicating that there is additional mass that cannot be detected directly with electromagnetic radiation This inconsistency is attributed to dark matter 41 The rotation curve of the Milky Way agrees with the universal rotation curve of spiral galaxies the best evidence for the existence of dark matter in galaxies Alternatively a minority of astronomers propose that a modification of the law of gravity may explain the observed rotation curve 236 Formation EditMain article Galaxy formation and evolution History Edit The Milky Way began as one or several small overdensities in the mass distribution in the Universe shortly after the Big Bang 13 61 billion years ago 237 238 239 Some of these overdensities were the seeds of globular clusters in which the oldest remaining stars in what is now the Milky Way formed Nearly half the matter in the Milky Way may have come from other distant galaxies 237 Nonetheless these stars and clusters now comprise the stellar halo of the Milky Way Within a few billion years of the birth of the first stars the mass of the Milky Way was large enough so that it was spinning relatively quickly Due to conservation of angular momentum this led the gaseous interstellar medium to collapse from a roughly spheroidal shape to a disk Therefore later generations of stars formed in this spiral disk Most younger stars including the Sun are observed to be in the disk 240 241 Since the first stars began to form the Milky Way has grown through both galaxy mergers particularly early in the Milky Way s growth and accretion of gas directly from the Galactic halo 241 The Milky Way is currently accreting material from several small galaxies including two of its largest satellite galaxies the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds through the Magellanic Stream Direct accretion of gas is observed in high velocity clouds like the Smith Cloud 242 243 Cosmological simulations indicate that 11 billion years ago it merged with a particularly large galaxy that has been labeled the Kraken 244 245 However properties of the Milky Way such as stellar mass angular momentum and metallicity in its outermost regions suggest it has undergone no mergers with large galaxies in the last 10 billion years This lack of recent major mergers is unusual among similar spiral galaxies its neighbour the Andromeda Galaxy appears to have a more typical history shaped by more recent mergers with relatively large galaxies 246 247 According to recent studies the Milky Way as well as the Andromeda Galaxy lie in what in the galaxy color magnitude diagram is known as the green valley a region populated by galaxies in transition from the blue cloud galaxies actively forming new stars to the red sequence galaxies that lack star formation Star formation activity in green valley galaxies is slowing as they run out of star forming gas in the interstellar medium In simulated galaxies with similar properties star formation will typically have been extinguished within about five billion years from now even accounting for the expected short term increase in the rate of star formation due to the collision between both the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy 248 In fact measurements of other galaxies similar to the Milky Way suggest it is among the reddest and brightest spiral galaxies that are still forming new stars and it is just slightly bluer than the bluest red sequence galaxies 249 Age and cosmological history Edit Comparison of the night sky with the night sky of a hypothetical planet within the Milky Way 10 billion years ago at an age of about 3 6 billion years and 5 billion years before the Sun formed 250 Globular clusters are among the oldest objects in the Milky Way which thus set a lower limit on the age of the Milky Way The ages of individual stars in the Milky Way can be estimated by measuring the abundance of long lived radioactive elements such as thorium 232 and uranium 238 then comparing the results to estimates of their original abundance a technique called nucleocosmochronology These yield values of about 12 5 3 billion years for CS 31082 001 251 and 13 8 4 billion years for BD 17 3248 252 Once a white dwarf is formed it begins to undergo radiative cooling and the surface temperature steadily drops By measuring the temperatures of the coolest of these white dwarfs and comparing them to their expected initial temperature an age estimate can be made With this technique the age of the globular cluster M4 was estimated as 12 7 0 7 billion years Age estimates of the oldest of these clusters gives a best fit estimate of 12 6 billion years and a 95 confidence upper limit of 16 billion years 253 In November 2018 astronomers reported the discovery of one of the oldest stars in the universe About 13 5 billion years old 2MASS J18082002 5104378 B is a tiny ultra metal poor UMP star made almost entirely of materials released from the Big Bang and is possibly one of the first stars The discovery of the star in the Milky Way galaxy suggests that the galaxy may be at least 3 billion years older than previously thought 254 255 256 Several individual stars have been found in the Milky Way s halo with measured ages very close to the 13 80 billion year age of the Universe In 2007 a star in the galactic halo HE 1523 0901 was estimated to be about 13 2 billion years old As the oldest known object in the Milky Way at that time this measurement placed a lower limit on the age of the Milky Way 257 This estimate was made using the UV Visual Echelle Spectrograph of the Very Large Telescope to measure the relative strengths of spectral lines caused by the presence of thorium and other elements created by the R process The line strengths yield abundances of different elemental isotopes from which an estimate of the age of the star can be derived using nucleocosmochronology 257 Another star HD 140283 is 14 5 0 7 billion years old 42 258 According to observations utilizing adaptive optics to correct for Earth s atmospheric distortion stars in the galaxy s bulge date to about 12 8 billion years old 259 The age of stars in the galactic thin disk has also been estimated using nucleocosmochronology Measurements of thin disk stars yield an estimate that the thin disk formed 8 8 1 7 billion years ago These measurements suggest there was a hiatus of almost 5 billion years between the formation of the galactic halo and the thin disk 260 Recent analysis of the chemical signatures of thousands of stars suggests that stellar formation might have dropped by an order of magnitude at the time of disk formation 10 to 8 billion years ago when interstellar gas was too hot to form new stars at the same rate as before 261 The satellite galaxies surrounding the Milky way are not randomly distributed but seem to be the result of a break up of some larger system producing a ring structure 500 000 light years in diameter and 50 000 light years wide 262 Close encounters between galaxies like that expected in 4 billion years with the Andromeda Galaxy rips off huge tails of gas which over time can coalesce to form dwarf galaxies in a ring at an arbitrary angle to the main disc 263 Intergalactic neighbourhood Edit Diagram of the galaxies in the Local Group relative to the Milky Way The position of the Local Group within the Laniakea Supercluster Main article Local Group The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are a binary system of giant spiral galaxies belonging to a group of 50 closely bound galaxies known as the Local Group surrounded by a Local Void itself being part of the Local Sheet 264 and in turn the Virgo Supercluster Surrounding the Virgo Supercluster are a number of voids devoid of many galaxies the Microscopium Void to the north the Sculptor Void to the left the Bootes Void to the right and the Canes Major Void to the south These voids change shape over time creating filamentous structures of galaxies The Virgo Supercluster for instance is being drawn towards the Great Attractor 265 which in turn forms part of a greater structure called Laniakea 266 Two smaller galaxies and a number of dwarf galaxies in the Local Group orbit the Milky Way The largest of these is the Large Magellanic Cloud with a diameter of 32 200 light years 267 It has a close companion the Small Magellanic Cloud The Magellanic Stream is a stream of neutral hydrogen gas extending from these two small galaxies across 100 of the sky The stream is thought to have been dragged from the Magellanic Clouds in tidal interactions with the Milky Way 268 Some of the dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way are Canis Major Dwarf the closest Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy Ursa Minor Dwarf Sculptor Dwarf Sextans Dwarf Fornax Dwarf and Leo I Dwarf The smallest dwarf galaxies of the Milky Way are only 500 light years in diameter These include Carina Dwarf Draco Dwarf and Leo II Dwarf There may still be undetected dwarf galaxies that are dynamically bound to the Milky Way which is supported by the detection of nine new satellites of the Milky Way in a relatively small patch of the night sky in 2015 269 There are also some dwarf galaxies that have already been absorbed by the Milky Way such as the progenitor of Omega Centauri 270 In 2014 researchers reported that most satellite galaxies of the Milky Way lie in a very large disk and orbit in the same direction 271 This came as a surprise according to standard cosmology the satellite galaxies should form in dark matter halos and they should be widely distributed and moving in random directions This discrepancy is still not fully explained 272 In January 2006 researchers reported that the heretofore unexplained warp in the disk of the Milky Way has now been mapped and found to be a ripple or vibration set up by the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds as they orbit the Milky Way causing vibrations when they pass through its edges Previously these two galaxies at around 2 of the mass of the Milky Way were considered too small to influence the Milky Way However in a computer model the movement of these two galaxies creates a dark matter wake that amplifies their influence on the larger Milky Way 273 Current measurements suggest the Andromeda Galaxy is approaching us at 100 to 140 km s 220 000 to 310 000 mph In 4 3 billion years there may be an Andromeda Milky Way collision depending on the importance of unknown lateral components to the galaxies relative motion If they collide the chance of individual stars colliding with each other is extremely low 274 but instead the two galaxies will merge to form a single elliptical galaxy or perhaps a large disk galaxy 275 over the course of about six billion years 276 Velocity EditAlthough special relativity states that there is no preferred inertial frame of reference in space with which to compare the Milky Way the Milky Way does have a velocity with respect to cosmological frames of reference One such frame of reference is the Hubble flow the apparent motions of galaxy clusters due to the expansion of space Individual galaxies including the Milky Way have peculiar velocities relative to the average flow Thus to compare the Milky Way to the Hubble flow one must consider a volume large enough so that the expansion of the Universe dominates over local random motions A large enough volume means that the mean motion of galaxies within this volume is equal to the Hubble flow Astronomers believe the Milky Way is moving at approximately 630 km s 1 400 000 mph with respect to this local co moving frame of reference 277 278 The Milky Way is moving in the general direction of the Great Attractor and other galaxy clusters including the Shapley Supercluster behind it 279 The Local Group a cluster of gravitationally bound galaxies containing among others the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy is part of a supercluster called the Local Supercluster centered near the Virgo Cluster although they are moving away from each other at 967 km s 2 160 000 mph as part of the Hubble flow this velocity is less than would be expected given the 16 8 million pc distance due to the gravitational attraction between the Local Group and the Virgo Cluster 280 Another reference frame is provided by the cosmic microwave background CMB in which the CMB temperature is least distorted by Doppler shift zero dipole moment The Milky Way is moving at 552 6 km s 1 235 000 13 000 mph 17 with respect to this frame toward 10 5 right ascension 24 declination J2000 epoch near the center of Hydra This motion is observed by satellites such as the Cosmic Background Explorer COBE and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe WMAP as a dipole contribution to the CMB as photons in equilibrium in the CMB frame get blue shifted in the direction of the motion and red shifted in the opposite direction 17 See also Edit solar system portal outer space portal astronomy portalBaade s Window Galactic astronomy Galactic Center GeV excess Oort constantsNotes Edit The distance towards its center Sagittarius A Some authors use the term Milky Way to refer exclusively to the band of light that the galaxy forms in the night sky while the galaxy receives the full name Milky Way Galaxy See for example Lausten et al 19 Pasachoff 20 Jones 21 van der Kruit 22 and Hodge et al 23 See also Bortle Dark Sky Scale The bright center of the galaxy is located in the constellation Sagittarius From Sagittarius the hazy band of white light appears to pass westward through the constellations of Scorpius Ara Norma Triangulum Australe Circinus Centaurus Musca Crux Carina Vela Puppis Canis Major Monoceros Orion and Gemini Taurus to the galactic anticenter in Auriga From there it passes through Perseus Andromeda Cassiopeia Cepheus and Lacerta Cygnus Vulpecula Sagitta Aquila Ophiuchus Scutum and back to Sagittarius These estimates are very uncertain as most non star objects are difficult to detect for example black hole estimates range from ten million to one billion 146 147 Karachentsev et al give a blue absolute magnitude of 20 8 Combined with a color index of 0 55 estimated here an absolute visual magnitude of 21 35 20 8 0 55 21 35 is obtained Note that determining the absolute magnitude of the Milky Way is very difficult because Earth is inside it For a photo see Sagittarius A Milky Way monster stars in cosmic reality show Chandra X ray Observatory Center for Astrophysics Harvard amp Smithsonian January 6 2003 Archived from the original on March 17 2008 Retrieved May 20 2012 References Edit a b Petrov L Kovalev Y Y Fomalont E B Gordon D 2011 The Very Long Baseline Array Galactic Plane Survey VGaPS The Astronomical Journal 142 2 35 arXiv 1101 1460 Bibcode 2011AJ 142 35P doi 10 1088 0004 6256 142 2 35 S2CID 121762178 Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration 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ISBN 978 1 85233 752 0 Falchi Fabio Cinzano Pierantonio Duriscoe Dan Kyba Christopher C M Elvidge Christopher D Baugh Kimberly Portnov Boris A Rybnikova Nataliya A Furgoni Riccardo June 1 2016 The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness Science Advances 2 6 e1600377 arXiv 1609 01041 Bibcode 2016SciA 2E0377F doi 10 1126 sciadv 1600377 ISSN 2375 2548 PMC 4928945 PMID 27386582 Aristotle with W D Ross ed The Works of Aristotle Oxford England Clarendon Press 1931 vol III Meteorologica E W Webster trans Book 1 Part 8 pp 39 40 Archived April 11 2016 at the Wayback Machine 2 Anaxagoras Democritus and their schools say that the milky way is the light of certain stars shaded by the earth from the sun s rays a b What does your image show mo www harvard edu Retrieved October 20 2022 a b Montada Josep Puig September 28 2007 Ibn Bajja Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archived from the original on July 28 2012 Retrieved July 11 2008 Aristotle Ross W D William David Smith J A John 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translation Galileo Galilei with Edward Stafford Carlos trans The Sidereal Messenger London Rivingtons 1880 pages 42 and 43 Archived December 2 2012 at the Wayback Machine O Connor J J Robertson E F November 2002 Galileo Galilei University of St Andrews Archived from the original on May 30 2012 Retrieved January 8 2007 Thomas Wright An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe London England H Chapelle 1750 On page 57 Archived November 20 2016 at the Wayback Machine Wright stated that despite their mutual gravitational attraction the stars in the constellations don t collide because they are in orbit so centrifugal force keeps them separated centrifugal force which not only preserves them in their orbits but prevents them from rushing all together by the common universal law of gravity On page 48 Archived November 20 2016 at the Wayback Machine Wright stated that the form of the Milky Way is a ring the stars are not infinitely dispersed and distributed in a promiscuous manner throughout all the mundane space without order or design this phaenomenon is no other than a certain effect arising from the observer s situation To a spectator placed in an indefinite space it i e the Milky Way Via Lactea is a vast ring of stars On page 65 Archived November 20 2016 at the Wayback Machine Wright speculated that the central body of the Milky Way around which the rest of the galaxy revolves might not be visible to us the central body A being supposed as incognitum i e an unknown without i e outside of the finite view On page 73 Archived November 20 2016 at the Wayback Machine Wright called the Milky Way the Vortex Magnus the great whirlpool and estimated its diameter to be 8 64 1012 miles 13 9 1012 km On page 33 Archived November 20 2016 at the Wayback Machine Wright speculated that there are a vast number of inhabited planets in the galaxy therefore we may justly suppose that so many radiant bodies i e stars were not created barely to enlighten an infinite void but to display an infinite shapeless universe crowded with myriads of glorious worlds all variously revolving round them and with an inconceivable variety of beings and states animate Immanuel Kant Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels Archived November 20 2016 at the Wayback Machine Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven Koenigsberg and Leipzig Germany Johann Friederich Petersen 1755 On pages 2 3 Kant acknowledged his debt to Thomas Wright Dem Herrn Wright von Durham einen Engelander war es vorbehalten einen glucklichen Schritt zu einer Bemerkung zu thun welche von ihm selber zu keiner gar zu tuchtigen Absicht gebraucht zu seyn scheinet und deren nutzliche Anwendung er nicht genugsam beobachtet hat Er betrachtete die Fixsterne nicht als ein ungeordnetes und ohne Absicht zerstreutes Gewimmel sondern er fand eine systematische Verfassung im Ganzen und eine allgemeine Beziehung dieser Gestirne gegen einen Hauptplan der Raume die sie einnehmen To Mr Wright of Durham an Englishman it was reserved to take a happy step towards an observation which seemed to him and to no one else to be needed for a clever idea the exploitation of which he hasn t studied sufficiently He regarded the fixed stars not as a disorganized swarm that was scattered without a design rather he found a systematic shape in the whole and a general relation between these stars and the principal plane of the space that they occupy Kant 1755 pages xxxiii xxxvi of the Preface Vorrede Archived November 20 2016 at the Wayback Machine Ich betrachtete die Art neblichter Sterne deren Herr von Maupertuis in der Abhandlung von der Figur der Gestirne gedenket und die die Figur von mehr oder weniger offenen Ellipsen vorstellen und versicherte mich leicht dass sie nichts anders als eine Haufung vieler Fixsterne seyn konnen Die jederzeit abgemessene Rundung dieser Figuren belehrte mich dass hier ein unbegreiflich zahlreiches Sternenheer und zwar um einen gemeinschaftlichen Mittelpunkt muste geordnet seyn weil sonst ihre freye Stellungen gegen einander wohl irregulare Gestalten aber nicht abgemessene Figuren vorstellen wurden Ich sahe auch ein dass sie in dem System darinn sie sich vereinigt befinden vornemlich auf eine Flache beschrankt seyn mussten weil sie nicht zirkelrunde sondern elliptische Figuren abbilden und dass sie wegen ihres blassen Lichts unbegreiflich weit von uns abstehen I considered the type of nebulous stars which Mr de Maupertuis considered in his treatise on the shape of stars and which present the figures of more or less open ellipses and I readily assured myself that they could be nothing else than a cluster of fixed stars That these figures always measured round informed me that here an inconceivably numerous host of stars which were clustered around a common center must be orderly because otherwise their free positions among each other would probably present irregular forms not measurable figures I also realized that in the system in which they find themselves bound they must be restricted primarily to a plane because they display not circular but elliptical figures and that on account of their faint light they are located inconceivably far from us Evans J C November 24 1998 Our Galaxy George Mason University Archived from the original on June 30 2012 Retrieved January 4 2007 The term Weltinsel island universe appears nowhere in Kant s book of 1755 The term first appeared in 1850 in the third volume of von Humboldt s Kosmos Alexander von Humboldt Kosmos vol 3 Stuttgart amp Tubingen Germany J G Cotta 1850 pp 187 189 From p 187 Archived November 20 2016 at the Wayback Machine Thomas Wright von Durham Kant Lambert und zuerst auch William Herschel waren geneigt die Gestalt der Milchstrasse und die scheinbare Anhaufung der Sterne in derselben als eine Folge der abgeplatteten Gestalt und ungleichen Dimensionen derWeltinsel Sternschict zu betrachten in welche unser Sonnensystem eingeschlossen ist Thomas Wright of Durham Kant Lambert 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