User:PeytonEvans25

The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains the Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. Stars: 250 billion ± 150 billion Sun's Galactic rotation period: 240 Myr Sun's distance to Galactic Center: 26.4 ± 1.0 kly (8.09 ± 0.31 kpc) Escape velocity at Sun's position: 550 km/s Thickness of thin stellar disk: ≈2 kly (0.6 kpc) Did you know: The Milky Way is about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 km (about 100,000 light years or about 30 kpc) across.The Galactic Center, or Galactic Centre, is the rotational center of the Milky Way. It is 8,122 ± 31 parsecs (26,490 ± 100 ly) away from Earth in the direction of the constellations Sagittarius, Ophiuchus, and Scorpius where the Milky Way appears brightest. It coincides with the compact radio source Sagittarius.Stars are not scattered randomly through space, they are gathered together into vast groups known as galaxies. The Sun belongs to a galaxy called the Milky Way. Astronomers estimate there are about 100 thousand million stars in the Milky Way alone. Outside that, there are millions upon millions of other galaxies also! Lenticular galaxies are disc galaxies that have used up or lost most of their interstellar matter and therefore have very little ongoing star formation. They may, however, retain significant dust in their disks. As a result, they consist mainly of aging stars (like elliptical galaxies).If a black hole is very small, the radiation effects are expected to become very strong. A black hole with the mass of a car would have a diameter of about 10−24 m and take a nanosecond to evaporate, during which time it would briefly have a luminosity of more than 200 times that of the Sun.Conventional black holes are formed by gravitational collapse of heavy objects such as stars, but they can also in theory be formed by other processes.The Smallest Known Black Hole. NASA scientists have identified the lightest black hole yet, just 3.8 times the mass of the sun, in a binary star system in the Milky Way known as XTE J1650-500.The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is called Sagittarius A. It has a mass equal to about 4 million suns and would fit inside a ball with a diameter about the size of the sun. How Do Black Holes Form?