The newest galaxy we know of formed only about 500 million years ago. Light at the galaxy’s center takes 25,000 light-years to travel from Earth. By measuring the age of these stars, and then calculating the interval between their formation and the death of the previous generation of stars, we can come to an approximate age of the Milky Way as 13.6 billion years. The investigation is on-going to determine the exact number of arms our galaxy has.In the center of the Milky Way is Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole. Galileo Galileifirst resolved the band of light int… Beryllium-9, however, is produced by collisions of cosmic rays with heavier elements.Since beryllium is formed in this way, and not in supernovae, it can act as a “cosmic clock” of sorts. Its stellar disk is approximately 100.000 light-years / 30 kpc in diameter.It is approximately 1.000 light-years / 0.3 kpc thick.
This glow’s resemblance to a pathway or a river is strong.
It is estimated to be 13.6 billion years old at a distance of 6.000 light-years from Earth. This large quantity of dark matter causes an invisible halo that surrounds the Milky Way.The 4 major spiral arms of the Milky Way contain a higher density of interstellar gas, dust and a greater concentration of star formation than the rest of the galaxy.The cyan, purple, green, and pink colors represent the major arms. A typical characteristic of spiral galaxies is that the orbital speeds of most stars do not depend strongly on their distance from the center.There are 2 small galaxies around with a number of dwarf galaxies in the Local Group who orbit the Milky Way. Well, even though this is a difficult question to answer, either way you slice the cake you need a lot of candles. Observations continue and now a raising belief is becoming predominant: that there are more enormous black holes of which we haven’t yet detected in our own galaxy.The Milky Way’s galactic disk is surrounded by a spheroidal halo of old stars and globular clusters.
However, We can be pretty sure that it hasn’t changed much in the last 1 or 2 billion years, as it takes a LONG time (a few hundred million years) for the dust to settle following s galactic merger (the elegant spiral galaxies generally turn into huge galactic blobs for a time). That would be mighty difficult to blow out all in one go.The oldest stars in the Milky Way are 13.4 billion years, give or take 800 million years. Thus, the Milky Way is essentially the same age as the universe itself. I gather a bunch up each week and answer them here.The Guide to Space is a series of space and astronomy poddcasts by Fraser Cain, publisher of Universe TodayEpisode 678: Q&A 126: When Did Mars' Dynamo Shut Off? It contains about a trillion stars, in contrast to the Milky Way’s 250-400 billion. Determined by comparing the stellar population of globular clusters with stellar evolutionary models, the ages of all those so far measured range from 11 billion to 13 billion years. The Milky Way Galaxy The major arms consist of the highest densities of both young and old stars; the minor arms are primarily filled with gas and pockets of star-forming activity. It is a fairly typical barred spiral with four major arms in its disk, at least one spur, and a newly discovered outer arm. The longer the duration between the first stars that created heavier elements and the stars that make up globular clusters in the early Milky Way, the more beryllium there should be from the exposure to galactic cosmic rays. This means that the Milky Way came about fairly close to right after the Big Bang. In fact, light even gives us a way to look back in time!Light always travels at a certain speed: nearly 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second. article last updated January 24, 2019 And it will be very different once it collides with Andromeda in a about 4 billion years. That would be mighty difficult to blow out all in one go. This huge galaxy is twice the diameter of our Milky Way at about 200,000 light-years. This discovery is controversial since it was believed that there shouldn’t be black holes of this size in our galaxy, with the exception of Sagittarius A*.