How many miles big is the Milky Way galaxy?

How many miles big is the Milky Way galaxy?

The approximate diameter is 14.6 million miles (23.5 million kilometers) . By comparison, the Milky Way itself is roughly 100,000 light-years wide and 1,000 light-years thick. A huge disk of gas around Sagittarius A* billows out as far as 5 to 30 light-years from the supermassive black hole.

How many kilometers across is the Milky Way galaxy?

So how big is it, and how does it measure up with other neighborhood residents? The numbers are pretty astounding. NASA estimates the galaxy at 100,000 light-years across. Since one light year is about 9.5 x 1012km, so the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy is about 9.5 x 1017 km in diameter.

How big is the Milky Way compared to Earth?

Answer: Assuming a diameter for the Milky Way galaxy of about 15 kpc, which is about 4.6×10^(17) km, and a diameter for the Earth of about 12756 km, the ratio of the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy to that of the Earth is about 3.6×10^(13).

How wide is the Milky Way in light years?

How many Earths can fit in Milky Way?

Plugging in our thickness and radius we get about 6.7 X 10^(51) km^3. Dividing the volume of the Milky Way by the volume of the Earth, you get (6.7 X 10^(51))/(10^12) =~ 6.7 X 10^(39) Earths that can fit in the volume of the Milky Way galaxy.

How many suns are in our galaxy?

There are likely to be many more planetary systems out there waiting to be discovered! Our Sun is just one of about 200 billion stars in our galaxy.

How fast is Milky Way moving?

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.

What is the speed of Milky Way galaxy?

The Milky Way, an average spiral galaxy, spins at a speed of 130 miles per second (210 km/sec) in our Sun’s neighborhood. New research has found that the most massive spiral galaxies spin faster than expected.

How fast are we moving in the Milky Way?

The Sun, Earth, and the entire solar system also are in motion, orbiting the center of the Milky Way at a blazing 140 miles a second. Even at this great speed, though, our planetary neighborhood still takes about 200 million years to make one complete orbit — a testament to the vast size of our home galaxy.

What is bigger than universe?

No, the universe contains all solar systems, and galaxies. Our Sun is just one star among the hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, and the universe is made up of all the galaxies – billions of them.

How many galaxies are in the universe?

This tiny patch of sky was full of galaxies, almost 10,000, of all different sizes and shapes. By multiplying this number by the number of times this tiny patch of sky would fit into the entire sky, astronomers came up with an estimate of between about 100 and 200 billion galaxies.

What’s the largest thing in the Milky Way galaxy?

The largest known ‘object’ in the Universe is the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. This is a ‘galactic filament’, a vast cluster of galaxies bound together by gravity, and it’s estimated to be about 10 billion light-years across!

Why is 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).

Why is the Milky Way blue?

The disk of our galaxy appears blue because it has a large proportion of young, hot O and B main sequence stars. The disk contains gas and dust from which stars can form.

How long would it take to cross the Milky Way in light years?

The disk of our home galaxy – the Milky Way – is bigger than we previously thought.

Is Milky Way or Andromeda bigger?

Most Messier objects are star clusters or gas clouds in our Milky Way galaxy. But the Andromeda galaxy is a whole separate galaxy, even bigger than our Milky Way. In a dark sky, you can see that it’s big on the sky as well, a smudge of distant light larger than a full moon. View at EarthSky Community Photos.

Is ton 618 bigger than the Milky Way?

In the case of Ton 618, the enormous Lyman-alpha nebula surrounding it has the diameter of at least 100 kiloparsecs (320,000 light-years), twice the size of the Milky Way.

How big is the universe in miles?

When we look in any direction, the furthest visible regions of the Universe are estimated to be around 46 billion light years away. That’s a diameter of 540 sextillion (or 54 followed by 22 zeros) miles.

How far is the biggest galaxy from Earth?

GN-z11
Helio radial velocity	295,050 ± 119,917 km/s (183,336 ± 74,513 mi/s)
Distance	≈32 billion ly (9.8 billion pc) (present proper distance) ≈13.4 billion ly (4.1 billion pc) (light-travel distance)
Apparent magnitude (V)	25.8H
Characteristics