# Tag Info

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### Does the Milky Way move through space?

Does the Milky Way move through space? Yes it does. I'm very fascinated with space, although I don't have a degree or any formal education, I'm still very in love with everything about it and ...
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### Does the Milky Way orbit around anything?

The object which has less mass and gravitational pull orbits around the nearest object with more mass and gravitational pull. Actually, both the heavier and the lighter object orbit around their ...
• 17.5k
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### Does the sun cross other spiral arms in its movement around the galaxy's center?

What is a spiral arm? The reason that the Sun, in principle (but see below), may cross spiral arms is that galactic spiral arms are not rigid entities consisting of some particular stars; rather they ...
• 32.3k
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### Are there any stars that orbit perpendicular to the Milky Way's galactic plane?

The Sun and most of the other stars are in the bulging disk of the Milky Way galaxy, but about 1% of the galaxy's stellar mass is in the galactic halo. The halo also includes 50 globular clusters and ...
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### Does the Milky Way move through space?

Galaxies move through space with velocities of the order of a several 100 km per second; small velocities for small groups (~100 km/s; e.g Carlberg et al. 2000) and large velocities for rich clusters (...
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### Why does the 70-solar-mass black hole in the LB-1 system challenge current astrophysics?

There're several pieces of information one needs to understand this. Although stars more massive than 70 solar masses exist, when they become black holes, they usually lose mass in the process. The ...
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### What will happen to the shape of a galaxy when a super massive black hole lying in its center dies(evaporates out)?

Presumbably we rotate beacuse of the BH. No. The galaxy is being held in one piece due to its own total gravity. The black hole is only a small fraction of that. Basically, the BH doesn't matter. ...
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### Why don't we see "the milky way" in both directions?

I'll turn my comment into a full answer. To put it simply, we actually do see the Milky Way all around us, even in the diametrically opposite direction from the galactic core. You can see this in the ...
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### Which part of the milky way does the image show?

I wholeheartedly recommend astrometry.net for this sort of thing. It Just Works(tm); running on your image produced this output with absolutely no hints or guidance from me: For avoidance of doubt, I ...
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### Do the axes of rotation of most stars in the Milky Way align reasonably closely with the axis of galactic rotation?

There is very likely to be a random scatter. Unlike planets orbiting the Sun in the Solar System, most of the stars in the Galaxy did not form at the same time as the Galaxy itself. There is therefore ...
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### How far is the Earth/Sun above/below the galactic plane, and is it heading toward/away from it?

Humphreys & Larsen (1995) suggest, using star count information, a distance of $20.5 \pm 3.5$ pc above the Galactic plane; consistent with, but more precise than the Bahcall paper referred to by ...
• 115k
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### Where does the Milky Way end?

Here's a rough sketch of the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy,* showing their approximate sizes and distance from each other to scale:   What the picture (hopefully) illustrates is the ...
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### What is supposedly in the center of the Milky Way?

Photos of the galactic center aren't too bright because of all the gas and dust between us and it. For example (in infrared): I'm guessing, though, that you're talking about other galaxies, because ...
• 33.8k
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### Is the Sun in our solar system moving or stationary?

The Sun moves, even in the context of the solar system. Gravity of the planets (mostly Jupiter) pulls the Sun out of position with respect to the centre of gravity of the solar system. This wikipedia ...
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