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Loading contentThe barred spiral galaxy that contains the Solar System, the Sun, and all stars visible to the naked eye.
galaxy:milky-wayDataset membership
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In the graph export: graph.json · graph.jsonld
Planned API: GET /api/v0/entities/galaxy:milky-way
Scientific entity. See the evidence framework and authority dashboard.
How The Milky Way connects across Asteria Star — scientific, cultural, and astrological links are kept separate.
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The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2022.
A bright open star cluster of hot young stars, easily visible to the naked eye.
The nearest open star cluster to the Solar System, forming a V-shaped grouping of stars.
The Sun and the bodies gravitationally bound to it.
ESO's optical/infrared array of four 8.2-metre telescopes at Cerro Paranal in Chile's Atacama Desert.
The world's largest fully steerable radio telescope, a 100-metre dish in Green Bank, West Virginia.
The world's largest single-dish radio telescope, a 500-metre aperture instrument in Guizhou, China.
An optical survey observatory in Chile conducting the wide, fast, deep Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
An ESA space observatory charting the positions, distances, and motions of nearly two billion stars in the Milky Way.
An American astronomer whose study of galaxy rotation curves provided strong evidence for dark matter.
An American astronomer and planetary scientist celebrated for his research and his work communicating science to the public.
An American astronomer whose discovery of the Cepheid period–luminosity relation gave astronomers a way to measure cosmic distances.
An American astronomer who developed the stellar spectral classification system still in use today.
A German-British astronomer who discovered several comets and was among the first women paid for scientific work.
A 16th-century Danish astronomer renowned for his exceptionally accurate naked-eye observations of the heavens.
A Greco-Roman astronomer whose Almagest codified the geocentric model that dominated astronomy for over a millennium.
An ancient Greek astronomer credited with compiling an early star catalogue and discovering the precession of the equinoxes.
An American astronomer and NASA's first chief of astronomy, often called the 'Mother of Hubble' for her role in space-based astronomy.
The Spitzer Space Telescope was a NASA infrared space observatory operating from 2003 to 2020.
The nearest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way and the most distant object readily visible to the naked eye.
A spiral galaxy in the Local Group, the third-largest member after Andromeda and the Milky Way.
A satellite dwarf galaxy of the Milky Way and one of the closest galaxies to our own.
A dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way, visible to the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere.
The brightest and most massive globular cluster orbiting the Milky Way.
The Very Large Array is a radio astronomy observatory in New Mexico consisting of 27 movable parabolic antennas arranged in a Y-shaped configuration.
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance astronomer who formulated the heliocentric model placing the Sun at the center of the universe.
Using Cepheid distances and galaxy redshifts, Edwin Hubble showed in 1929 that galaxies recede faster the farther away they are — the universe is expanding, as Lemaître had derived two years earlier.
Fritz Zwicky inferred unseen mass in the Coma cluster in 1933, and from the 1970s Vera Rubin's galaxy rotation curves showed that galaxies are dominated by invisible 'dark matter'.
Over three decades, the teams of Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez tracked stars orbiting the centre of the Milky Way, revealing a four-million-solar-mass black hole, Sagittarius A*.
In 1920 Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis debated the scale of the universe: whether the spiral nebulae lie within the Milky Way or are separate 'island universes'.
The Event Horizon Telescope's 2022 image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Galaxy.
The Milky Way arching over ESO's Very Large Telescope at Paranal, Chile — one of the darkest skies on Earth.
A spiral galaxy whose arms wind out from the ends of a straight bar of stars crossing the centre. The bar channels gas inward, feeding star formation and the central black hole. The Milky Way is one.
The gravitationally-bound group of galaxies the Milky Way belongs to — dominated by the Milky Way and Andromeda, with the Triangulum galaxy and dozens of dwarfs. Andromeda and the Milky Way are approaching, and will merge in a few billion years.
The vast supercluster the Milky Way belongs to, defined in 2014 by the flows of galaxies toward a common gravitational focus. It contains around a hundred thousand galaxies across half a billion light-years.
The flattened, rotating layer that holds most of the Milky Way's stars, gas, and dust, and where stars are still being born today. Only a few hundred parsecs thick but tens of thousands across, it contains the spiral arms and the young, metal-rich stars of the Galactic disc — the Sun among them.
A more extended, puffed-up disc of older, more metal-poor stars that envelops the thin disk. Its stars move on hotter orbits and formed early in the Galaxy's history, making the thick disk a fossil record of a more turbulent youth — perhaps heated by an ancient merger.
The dense, roughly spheroidal concentration of mostly old stars at the heart of the Milky Way. Boxy and peanut-shaped when seen edge-on, the bulge is intimately tied to the central bar and holds clues to how the inner Galaxy assembled.
An elongated bar of stars spanning the central few kiloparsecs, which makes the Milky Way a barred spiral galaxy. The bar funnels gas inward, drives the boxy bulge, and sets up resonances that shape the orbits of disc stars far from the centre.
A vast, sparse, roughly spherical cloud of the Galaxy's oldest and most metal-poor stars, together with its globular clusters, reaching far beyond the disc. Built largely from the shredded remains of smaller galaxies, the stellar halo is the Milky Way's deep archaeological archive.
The bright lanes that wind through the disc, marked out by gas, dust, and freshly-formed luminous stars. The arms are thought to be density waves — regions where orbits crowd together and trigger star formation — rather than fixed structures, so stars drift in and out of them over time.
The outer disc of the Milky Way is not flat but bent, curving up on one side and down on the other like a vinyl record left in the sun. This warp, traced by gas and by young stars, is likely stirred by the gravitational tug of the Magellanic Clouds and the dark-matter halo.
The crowded, dust-shrouded core of the Milky Way, about 26,000 light-years away, home to a dense star cluster and the four-million-solar-mass black hole Sagittarius A*. Hidden at optical wavelengths, it is studied in radio, infrared, and X-rays, and its stars' orbits weigh the central black hole directly.
An enormous halo of tenuous, million-degree gas that surrounds the Milky Way, detectable in X-rays and in absorption against distant sources. This hot corona is a reservoir of baryons and the medium through which fresh gas accretes onto the Galaxy and enriched gas is expelled.
The Milky Way's disc does not turn as a solid body: inner and outer stars complete their orbits at different rates. Yet the orbital speed stays surprisingly flat far from the centre instead of falling off, one of the clearest signs that the visible Galaxy is embedded in a massive halo of unseen dark matter.
A proposed — and much-debated — region of the Galaxy thought to be most favourable to complex life: far enough from the crowded, radiation-soaked centre yet metal-rich enough to build planets. Whether such a zone is truly well-defined remains an open question, and it is offered as a hypothesis rather than an established boundary.
An explorer of the structure of our own Galaxy — its discs, bulge, bar, spiral arms, and halo, and the Sun's place within them. Prepared for a three-dimensional rendering of galactic structure; today it maps the anatomy of the Milky Way onto its components.
An explorer of our galactic neighbourhood — the Milky Way, Andromeda, Triangulum, the Magellanic Clouds, and the dozens of dwarf galaxies bound with them into the Local Group. Prepared for a three-dimensional map of the nearby universe.
A browsable index of catalogued galaxies — spirals, ellipticals, and irregulars — organised by morphology and distance. The building blocks of cosmic structure, each linked to its place in the knowledge graph.
The shortest chain of relations connecting any two entities, found by breadth-first search over the real graph. Every link in the path is a genuine relation — a demonstration of how tightly the knowledge is woven together.
Our home galaxy and the Sun's place within it. The measured part of this picture — the local stellar neighbourhood — is the real 3D star field; the wider structure of the Galaxy (its disc, bulge, bar, spiral arms, halo, and centre) is presented from the galactic-structure catalogue as described components, because numeric galaxy-scale positions are not part of the data.
Our galactic neighbourhood — the Milky Way, Andromeda, Triangulum, the Magellanic Clouds, and the dozens of dwarf galaxies bound with them. The members and their relationships are drawn from the graph; their separations are given by the catalogue's descriptive scale labels, because numeric inter-galactic distances and positions are not part of the data.
A coordinate system aligned with the Milky Way, measuring galactic longitude from the direction of the Galactic Centre along the galactic plane and galactic latitude above or below it. It is the natural frame for describing the structure of our Galaxy — spiral arms, the disk, and the distribution of stars and gas.
The nearest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way and the most distant object readily visible to the naked eye.
Barred spiral galaxy in Corvus, magnitude 10.2.
Barred spiral galaxy in Corvus, magnitude 11.04.
Irregular galaxy in Sagittarius, magnitude 10.05.
Barred spiral galaxy in Lynx, magnitude 11.71.
Spiral galaxy in Virgo, magnitude 10.8.
Facts on this topic will be cited from these primary and reference sources.
Mission data, planetary science, space telescopes, and public-domain imagery.
Most NASA-produced imagery is in the public domain; individual items are checked for usage terms before publication.
European missions, observatories, and space science imagery.
Official naming, definitions, constellation boundaries, and astronomical nomenclature.