How thick is the Milky Way compared to its diameter?

How thick is the Milky Way compared to its diameter?

The Milky Way is a huge disk, roughly 100,000 to 120,000 light years across. Its thickness is 1,000 light years throughout most of the disk, but there is a spheroidal bulge at the center of the galaxy that is 12,000 light years in diameter.

How wide is the widest galaxy?

The biggest known galaxy is IC 1101, which is 50 times the Milky Way’s size and about 2,000 times more massive. It is about 5.5 million light-years across.

How broad is the Milky Way?

“The disc of our Galaxy is huge, around 200 thousand light years in diameter” says Martín López-Corredoira, a researcher at the IAC and the first author of the article recently published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and whose authors come from both the IAC and the NAOC.

What is the closest galaxy to the Milky Way?

the Andromeda galaxy
Although several dozen minor galaxies lie closer to our Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy is the closest large spiral galaxy to ours. Excluding the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, visible from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere, the Andromeda galaxy is the brightest external galaxy you can see.

Is Milky Way galaxy bigger than Andromeda?

By some estimates, the Andromeda Galaxy contains roughly one trillion stars. That’s significantly bigger than the Milky Way, which more recent estimates suggest is 150,000 light-years across (though the exact boundary of where either of these galaxies “end” is a bit nebulous).

What is the difference between the Milky Way and the Milky Way galaxy?

What is the difference between the Milky Way and the Milky Way Galaxy? And the answer was: The Milky Way is a fairly narrow band of faint diffuse light around the celestial sphere. The Milky Way Galaxy is a spiral galaxy of about 100 billion stars.

What is the most powerful thing in the universe?

That’s about the same amount of energy in 10 trillion trillion billion megaton bombs! These explosions generate beams of high-energy radiation, called gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), which are considered by astronomers to be the most powerful thing in the universe.

What’s the farthest thing away from Earth?

How big is the Milky Way galaxy compared to other galaxies?

We might think our Milky Way is large, but it’s a rather small galaxy compared to other galaxies. Milky Way is ‘only’ 100,000 light years in diameter and that is nothing compared to for example Hercules A, which is 1.5 million light years across.

Is the Milky Way the biggest galaxy in outer space?

The biggest known galaxy is IC 1101, which is 50 times the Milky Way’s size and about 2,000 times more massive. It is about 5.5 million light-years across. Nebulas, or vast clouds of gas, also have impressively large sizes. NGC 604 in the Triangulum Galaxy is commonly cited as one of the largest; it’s roughly 1,520 light-years across.

What galaxy is the closest large galaxy to the Milky Way?

Andromeda Galaxy Facts. The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is the closest large galaxy to the Milky Way and is one of a few galaxies that can be seen unaided from the Earth. In approximately 4.5 billion years the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are expected to collide and the result will be a giant elliptical galaxy.

What is bigger the galaxy or the Milky Way?

The largest known spiral galaxy, NGC 6872, which is 522,000 light-years across from the tips of its outstretched spiral arms, is about 5 times the size of the Milky Way . Gigantic elliptical galaxies range in shape from nearly spherical to nearly flat, and they can contain as many as a trillion stars.