Milky Way

Epic card · No. 3592

The Milky Way or Milky Way Galaxy, or simply the Galaxy, 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 by stars in other arms of the galaxy, which are so far away that they cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. 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, but following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Doust Curtis, observations by Edwin Hubble in 1923 showed that the Milky Way was just one of many galaxies. The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with a D25 isophotal diameter estimated at 26.8 ± 1.1 kiloparsecs (87,400 ± 3,600 light-years), but also has a surrounding area of dark matter with a total diameter possibly approaching 613 kpc (2 million ly). The stars in...

Read on Wikipedia · Image ESO/Y. Beletsky, CC BY 4.0