Deneb is not truly distant
– dot A is closest to representing is location relative to the Sun, and it is barely a separate dot from the Sun. Deneb is only 1.4% of the diameter of the Milky Way distant from the Sun!
Why is Deneb so bright?
Deneb is a bluish-white supergiant around 200 times the size of the Sun and burning through its fuel at a rapid rate. … This star appears bright not because it’s close — in fact, it’s very far away — but because it
has enough luminosity to overcome great distance
and still shine in our sky at magnitude 1.25.
How did astronomers determine the distance to the Milky Way’s globular clusters and what did this measurement prove?
Shapley discovered variable stars in a large percentage of the globular clusters he observed. He used
Leavitt’s method that relied on Cepheid brightness
to determine the distances to all of the clusters he observed.
How far is the Sun from the center of the Milky Way galaxy explain your reasoning?
The Sun is located on one of the spiral arms,
about 25,000 light-years
away from the center of the galaxy. Even if you could travel at the speed of light (300,000 kilometers, or 186,000 miles, per second), it would take you about 25,000 years to reach the middle of the Milky Way.
How long does it take for light to travel from one side of the Milky Way galaxy to the other?
Light can take
tens of thousands of years or more
to reach us from distant parts of our galaxy, which is roughly 100,000 light years wide.
Does the earth lie close to the center of the galaxy?
The Earth lies
close to the center of the Galaxy
. Motions of objects near our Galaxy’s core suggest the central black hole is about 3.7 billion solar masses.
What did Shapley not know messed up his measurements?
Shapley, the prodigy, made a
monumentally correct deduction from existing astronomical data that our Sun was not at the center of our Galaxy
and that our Galaxy was much larger than anyone had previously believed.
What lies at the center of the Milky Way galaxy?
The Galactic Center (or Galactic Centre) is the rotational center,
the barycenter
, of the Milky Way galaxy. Its central massive object is a supermassive black hole of about 4 million solar masses, which powers the compact radio source Sagittarius A*, which is almost exactly at the galactic rotational center.
Where would you look for the youngest stars in the Milky Way galaxy?
Where do we find the youngest stars in the Milky Way Galaxy? Young stars, gas, and dust are found
close to the plane of the disk
.
What are we looking at when we see the Milky Way?
When we look to the edge, we see
a spiral arm of the Milky Way known as the Orion-Cygnus Arm
(or the Orion spur): a river of light across the sky that gave rise to so many ancient myths. The solar system is just on the inner edge of this spiral arm.
How fast is the Milky Way moving through space?
And how fast is the Milky Way Galaxy moving? The speed turns out to be an astounding
1.3 million miles per hour
(2.1 million km/hr)! We are moving roughly in the direction on the sky that is defined by the constellations of Leo and Virgo.
How many light years would it take to reach the end of the universe?
The light-travel distance to the edge of the observable universe is the age of the Universe divided by the speed of light,
13.8 billion light years
.
How long would it take to reach Andromeda at the speed of light?
How long would it take to get to the Andromeda Galaxy? Forget it! Although it may be one of the closest galaxies to our own, since the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years distant it would take
2.5 million years
to get there if (and it’s a huge ‘if’) we could travel at the speed of light.
Where in the universe are we?
In the vast, expanding space known as the universe, humans reside on
a small, rocky planet called Earth
. Our planet is part of a discrete solar system in an arm of the spiral shaped Milky Way Galaxy.
Why is there a black hole at the center of every galaxy?
The best explanation is that
there was a recent collision between two galaxies
, and that their supermassive black holes
Is there a massive black hole at the center of the galaxy?
For several years the scientific community has agreed that there is a mass at the center of the Milky Way galaxy and that the mass is a
supermassive black hole
—it has been named Sagittarius A
