How many km is the Milky Way?

How many km is the Milky Way?

The Milky Way is about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 km (about 100,000 light years or about 30 kpc) across. The Sun does not lie near the center of our Galaxy. It lies about 8 kpc from the center on what is known as the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.

What is the diameter of Milky Way?

Is the Milky Way is 100000 light years in size?

Our galaxy probably contains 100 to 400 billion stars, and is about 100,000 light-years across.

How thick is Milky Way?

Latest estimates show that the Milky Way is believed to be about 12,000 light years thick, from top to bottom. The “ball” of the Milky Way is known as its “bulge” and is about 10,000 light years across, containing a dense halo of stars, gas, and dust. At the center of the bulge is the area known as the Galactic Center.

Is Milky Way bigger than galaxy?

The Milky Way is big, but some galaxies, like our Andromeda Galaxy neighbor, are much larger. The universe is all of the galaxies – billions of them! NASA’s telescopes allow us to study galaxies beyond our own in exquisite detail, and to explore the most distant reaches of the observable universe.

Where is the end of the Milky Way?

This occurred at a distance of about 950,000 light-years from the Milky Way’s center, marking the galaxy’s edge, the scientists say. The edge is 35 times farther from the galactic center than the sun is.

How big is the milky black hole?

Scientists had previously been able to calculate that Sagittarius A* is 16 million miles (26 million kilometers) in diameter. The Milky Way’s black hole is huge compared to the black holes left behind when massive stars die (opens in new tab).

Is Milky Way bigger than black hole?

The discovery is quite surprising, since the black hole is five times more massive than the Milky Way’s black hole despite the galaxy being less than five-thousandths the mass of the Milky Way.

Which Milky Way is the biggest?

The biggest known galaxy, first described in a 1990 study from the journal Science (opens in new tab), is IC 1101, which stretches as wide as 4 million light-years across, according to NASA (opens in new tab).

Can we go 1 Lightyear?

As defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a light-year is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year (365.25 days)….Definitions.

1 light-year	= 9460730472580800 metres (exactly)
≈ 9.461 trillion kilometres (5.879 trillion miles)
≈ 63241.077 astronomical units
≈ 0.306601 parsecs

How many years is 13 billion light-years?

Current observations suggest that the Universe is about 13.7 billion years old. We know that light takes time to travel, so that if we observe an object that is 13 billion light years away, then that light has been traveling towards us for 13 billion years.

Is the space infinite?

There’s a limit to how much of the universe we can see. The observable universe is finite in that it hasn’t existed forever. It extends 46 billion light years in every direction from us. (While our universe is 13.8 billion years old, the observable universe reaches further since the universe is expanding).

Can we pass the Milky Way?

So, to leave our Galaxy, we would have to travel about 500 light-years vertically, or about 25,000 light-years away from the galactic centre. We’d need to go much further to escape the ‘halo’ of diffuse gas, old stars and globular clusters that surrounds the Milky Way’s stellar disk.

How old is the galaxy?

Astronomers believe that our own Milky Way galaxy is approximately 13.6 billion years old. The newest galaxy we know of formed only about 500 million years ago.

How Fast Is Milky Way?

And how fast is the Milky Way Galaxy moving? The speed turns out to be an astounding 1.3 million miles per hour (2.1 million km/hr)! We are moving roughly in the direction on the sky that is defined by the constellations of Leo and Virgo.

Is the Milky Way infinite?

Every location in the universe has its own sphere of observation beyond which it cannot see. Since our observable universe is not infinite, it has an edge.

How far is the Milky Way moving?

The Milky Way itself is moving through the vastness of intergalactic space. Our galaxy belongs to a cluster of nearby galaxies, the Local Group, and together we are easing toward the center of our cluster at a leisurely 25 miles a second.

How far is Earth from stars in KM?

Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our own, is still 40,208,000,000,000 km away. (Or about 268,770 AU.) When we talk about the distances to the stars, we no longer use the AU, or Astronomical Unit; commonly, the light year is used.

Can we leave the Milky Way?

The technology required to travel between galaxies is far beyond humanity’s present capabilities, and currently only the subject of speculation, hypothesis, and science fiction. However, theoretically speaking, there is nothing to conclusively indicate that intergalactic travel is impossible.