If you ask any of us about our place of residence, the answer will most likely be the name of the city or village, street, house, apartment. Maybe someone will name another country, or some other joker will say that he lives on planet Earth. This is how we live on Earth, and not all of us know what place it occupies in the vast Universe. The first point of our astronomical address will be our Earth. This is a rather unusual planet, which has a unique atmosphere, huge oceans on its surface, and is protected from external radiation by powerful magnetic field, ozone layer and ionosphere. The Earth is at a distance of 1 astronomical unit from the Sun. It is not difficult to guess that the very concept of an astronomical unit arose as some kind of standard value. If we convert this distance into kilometers, then we get the distance of the maximum distance of the Earth from the Sun - Aphelion, equal to approximately 152 million kilometers. This is how far our planet is located from the Sun. Or is it still close?
Apparently, it’s still close, because, for example, Pluto, which is located almost on the border of our solar system, is already located at a distance of 12 billion kilometers, or 80 astronomical units. This is our huge planetary system. Moreover, the main place in it is occupied not by planets, but by our Star - the Sun, which makes up approximately 99 percent of the mass of the entire solar system. It is not difficult to calculate that all the planets, including not only the tiny Earth, but also the giant Jupiter, make up less than one percent of its mass. It really makes you think about our place in the Universe. In the solar system, the Earth, despite all its features, is just one of the planets Earth group, which, besides it, also includes Mercury, Venus and Mars.
From the Sun to the Milky Way
But let's move on - we realized that we are among the planets of the Terrestrial group, in the solar system, the basis of which is the star Sun. To better understand the full scale, it is worth noting that our Sun, which from Earth looks like a small bright lantern, actually has a diameter equal to almost 109 times the diameter of the Earth. “What a huge Sun!” - a thought comes to mind. However, by the standards of the galaxy, it is just an ordinary yellow dwarf, a very small and inconspicuous star. Among the bright tribe of stars, there are colossal red giants that are thousands of times larger than the Sun. Such are the scales!
Of course, the Sun also enters some other big system. And such a system is our galaxy - Milky Way. It is part of it that is visible on a clear moonless night, like a foggy strip passing through the entire sky. If we look at this stripe through binoculars, we will see a huge number of stars. Indeed, in our galaxy, in addition to the Sun, there are about 200 billion stars, although some scientists are of the opinion that there are twice as many. All these stars form a huge spiral that rotates around its center.
Our Sun occupies a far from central position in this scattering of stars, being in one of the branches of the spiral - in the Orion arm. And, like billions of other luminaries, it revolves around the center of the galaxy. At the same time, the Sun is closer to the periphery at a distance of about 26 thousand light years from this center. That is, if we fly there at the speed of light, then millennia will pass before we reach the core of the Galaxy.
From the Galaxy to infinity
Now we have reached the huge Milky Way galaxy, with a diameter of 100 thousand light years, which, in the form of a spiral disk consisting of myriads of stars, rushes through space and time. But our galaxy is not alone in the Universe. There are a huge number of them - modern astronomers can currently observe 100 billion galaxies. But apparently there are many more of them.
Our galaxy has neighbors - the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds and the Andromeda Galaxy. Together with its neighbors, the Milky Way is part of the local group of Galaxies. In addition to those listed, it includes about 50 other systems.
The Local Group of galaxies is in turn part of the Virgo Supercluster of Galaxies, which covers galaxies within a radius of 200 million light years and contains about thirty thousand galaxies.
The scale amazes the imagination and instills a kind of awe at the enormity of such systems. But what next? Next, we can highlight that part of the Universe that we can observe with all the instruments available to us - it is called the Metagalaxy. Next comes the entire Universe as a whole, the presence of boundaries of which, although modern physics recognizes, their exact definition is still only at a hypothetical level.

> quoted1 > > Where is the Earth located in the Milky Way?

Place of the Earth and the Solar System in the Milky Way Galaxy: where the Sun and planet are located, parameters, distance from the center and plane, structure with photo.

For many centuries, scientists believed that the Earth was the center of the entire Universe. It’s not hard to think why this happened, because the Earth is in and we couldn’t look beyond it. Only a century of research and observation helped to understand that everything celestial bodies the system orbits the main star.

The system itself also rotates around the galactic center. Although then people did not understand this either. We had to spend a certain period of time to guess about the existence of many galaxies and determine their place in ours. What place does Earth occupy in the Milky Way galaxy?

Location of the Earth in the Milky Way

Earth is located in the Milky Way galaxy. We live in a huge and spacious place, spanning 100,000-120,000 light years in diameter and approximately 1000 light years in width. The territory is home to 400 billion stars.

The galaxy received such a scale thanks to its unusual diet - it absorbed and continues to be fed by other small galaxies. For example, there is a Dwarf Galaxy on the dining table right now. Big Dog, whose stars join our disk. But if we compare with others, ours is average. Even the next one is twice as large.

Structure

The planet lives in a spiral-type galaxy with a bar. Long years thought that there were 4 arms, but recent studies confirm only two: Scutum-Centauri and Carina-Sagittarius. They emerged from dense waves orbiting the galaxy. That is, these are grouped stars and gas clouds.

What about a photo of the Milky Way galaxy? All of them are artistic interpretations or real photographs, but very similar to our galaxies. Of course, we didn’t come to this right away, since no one could say exactly what it looks like (we are inside it, after all).

Modern instruments allow us to count up to 400 billion stars, each of which can have a planet. 10-15% of the mass goes to “luminous matter”, and the rest is stars. Despite the huge array, only 6000 light years in the visible spectrum are open to us for observation. But here infrared devices come into play, opening up new territories.

There is a huge halo around the galaxy dark matter, covering as much as 90% of the total mass. No one yet knows what it is, but its presence confirms the impact on other objects. It is believed that it keeps the Milky Way from disintegrating as it rotates.

Location of the Solar System in the Milky Way

The Earth is 25,000 light years away from the galactic center and the same amount from the edge. If you imagine the galaxy as a giant musical record, then we are located halfway between central part and the edge. More specifically, we occupy a place in the Orion arm between the two main arms. It extends 3,500 light-years in diameter and stretches out to 10,000 light-years.

The galaxy can be seen dividing the heavens into two hemispheres. This suggests that we are located close to the galactic plane. The Milky Way has a low surface brightness due to the abundance of dust and gas obscuring the disk. This makes it difficult not only to consider central part, but also look at the other side.

The system takes 250 million years to complete its entire orbital path—a “cosmic year.” During their last passage, dinosaurs roamed the Earth. And what will happen next? Will people go extinct or will they be replaced by a new species?

In general, we live in a huge and amazing place. New knowledge makes one get used to the fact that the Universe is much larger than all assumptions. Now you know where Earth is in the Milky Way.

Incredible facts

Have you ever wondered how big the Universe is?

8. However, this is nothing compared to the Sun.

Photo of the Earth from space

9. And this view of our planet from the moon.

10. This is us from the surface of Mars.

11. And this view of the Earth behind the rings of Saturn.

12. And this is the famous photograph" Pale blue dot ", where the Earth is photographed from Neptune, from a distance of almost 6 billion kilometers.

13. Here is the size Earth compared to the Sun, which doesn’t even fit completely into the photo.

Biggest star

14. And this Sun from the surface of Mars.

15. As the famous astronomer Carl Sagan once said, in space more stars than a grain of sand on all the beaches of the Earth.

16. There are many stars that are much larger than our Sun. Just look how tiny the Sun is.

Photo of the Milky Way galaxy

18. But nothing can compare to the size of the galaxy. If you reduce The sun to the size of a leukocyte(white blood cell), and shrink the Milky Way Galaxy using the same scale, the Milky Way would be the size of the United States.

19. This is because the Milky Way is simply huge. That's where the solar system is inside it.

20. But we see only very much a small part of our galaxy.

21. But even our galaxy is tiny compared to others. Here Milky Way compared to galaxy IC 1011, which is located 350 million light years from Earth.

22. Think about it, in this photograph taken by the Hubble telescope, thousands of galaxies, each containing millions of stars, each with their own planets.

23. Here is one of galaxy UDF 423, located 10 billion light years away. When you look at this photograph, you are looking billions of years into the past. Some of these galaxies formed several hundred million years after the Big Bang.

24. But remember that this photo is very, a very small part of the universe. It's just an insignificant part of the night sky.

25. We can quite confidently assume that somewhere there is black holes. Here's the size of the black hole compared to Earth's orbit.

To ancient people, the Earth seemed huge. After all, no one managed to get around it on foot or even ride around on horseback. Therefore, ancient philosophers, thinking about the structure of the Universe, placed the Earth at its center. All celestial bodies, they believed, revolve around the Earth.

IN modern world when there is aviation and spaceships, the idea that our planet is not at all the center of the universe does not seem seditious to anyone.
However, this idea was first expressed in the 3rd century BC. Aristarchus of Samos. Unfortunately, almost all the works of this ancient Greek scientist have been lost and are known to us only in the retelling of his contemporary Archimedes. Therefore, the assumption that the Earth revolves around the Sun (and not the Sun around the Earth) is usually associated with the name of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who lived in the 15th-16th centuries. Copernicus arranged the planets of the solar system known to him as follows: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn revolve around the Sun, and the Moon revolves around the Earth. But further behind Saturn, Copernicus placed the “sphere of fixed stars” - a kind of wall enclosing the Universe. But Copernicus could not guess what was behind it - he did not have enough data for this. One should not accuse Copernicus of myopia, because the telescope that brought distant space closer to us was first used by Galileo only a hundred years later.

The ancient Greek scientist Ptolemy developed a model of the Universe in which the Earth was at the center of the universe, and the rest of the celestial bodies revolved around it.

Modern science knows that our Sun is one of countless stars in the Universe, not the largest, not the brightest, not the hottest, moreover, the Sun is located far from the center of our Galaxy - a giant cluster of stars, which includes the Sun. And we are lucky in this. After all, otherwise such streams of cosmic rays would fall on the Earth that life would hardly arise on it. 9 large planets revolve around the Sun, minor planets - asteroids, comets and very small “pebbles” - meteoroids. All this together forms the solar system.


According to modern ideas, 9 large planets revolve around the Sun. The 4 closest to the Sun are small and solid. Next lies the belt of small planets (asteroids), and behind it are the giant planets, consisting mainly of liquids and gases. The farthest known planet in the solar system, Pluto, is also the smallest and coldest.

Earth is one of 9 planets. Not the biggest, but not the smallest, not the closest to the Sun, but not the farthest. The largest planet is Jupiter. Its mass is 318 times that of Earth. But Jupiter has no solid surface to walk on. The farthest planet from the Sun, Pluto, is almost 40 times farther from the Sun than Earth. Its surface is hard, it would be easy to walk on it - Pluto is smaller than the Moon and attracts weakly towards itself. It’s just cold there: the temperature is 200-240°C below the freezing point of water. Under such conditions, not only water, but also most gases become solid. But on Venus, our closest neighbor, the temperature is above +450°C. It turns out that the Earth is the only planet in the Universe so far suitable for life.

From the Earth to the Sun there are about 150 million km. Is it a lot or a little? Let's compare this distance with the sizes of the Sun and Earth. The diameter of the Sun is about 100 times smaller, and the diameter of the Earth is 10,000 times smaller. This means that if we depict the Sun as a circle with a diameter of 1 cm (the size of a 1 ruble coin), then we will have to draw the Earth at a distance of 1 m (at the other end of a large table), and it will be barely noticeable accurate.

All people experience mixed feelings when they look into the starry sky on a clear night. All the problems of an ordinary person begin to seem insignificant, and everyone begins to think about the meaning of their existence. The night sky seems overwhelmingly huge, but in reality we can only see the immediate surroundings.

This is Earth. This is where we live.

And this is where we are in our solar system.

Scaled distance between the Earth and the Moon. Doesn't look too big, right?

It's worth thinking again though. Within this distance you can place
all the planets of our solar system, beautiful and neat.


But the size of the Earth (well, six Earths) compared to Saturn.

If our planet had rings like Saturn, they would look like this.

There are tons of comets between our planets.
This is what one of them looks like compared to Los Angeles.


But this is still nothing compared to our Sun. Just take a look.

This is what we look like from Mars.

Looking out from behind the rings of Saturn.

This is what our planet looks like from the edge of the solar system.

Comparison of the scales of the Earth and the Sun. It's scary, isn't it?


And here is the same Sun from the surface of Mars.

But that's nothing. They say there are more stars in space than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth.

And there are stars much larger than our little Sun. Just look how tiny it is compared to the star in the constellation Canis Major.

But none of them can compare with the size of the galaxy.
If you reduce the Sun to the size of a white blood cell and reduce
in the same ratio, the Milky Way Galaxy would be the size of the United States.


The Milky Way is huge. We are somewhere here.

But that's all we can see.

However, even our galaxy is short compared to some others. Here's the Milky Way compared to IC 1011.


Just think about everything that could be inside there.

Go ahead. There are thousands upon thousands of galaxies in this Hubble image, each containing millions of stars, each with its own planets.


Just keep in mind - an illustration of a very small part of the universe.
A small part of the night sky.

And it is quite possible to assume that there are black holes there.
Here's the size of the black hole compared to Earth's orbit, just for fun


So if you're ever upset that you missed out
your favorite TV show... just remember...
This is your home

This is your home on the scale of the solar system

And this is what happens if you zoom out.

Let's continue...

And a bit more...

Almost...

And here it is. That's all there is in the observable Universe.
And this is our place in it. Just a tiny ant in a giant jar