This story is a part of our Cosmic Perspective collection, through which we confront the staggering vastness of the cosmos and our place in it. Learn the remainder of the collection right here. Subscribers can see a bigger model of this map on the backside of the web page.

This map exhibits the circle of the cosmos that surrounds us, extending to a distance of 200 million mild years. At this scale, house is comprised of clusters of galaxies and voids, the latter being areas with comparatively few galaxies. The Milky Means, on the centre, is a component of the Native Group of galaxies, with the Virgo cluster our nearest neighbour.

Majestic spiral

The Milky Means’s spiral construction is dominated by two principal arms referred to as Scutum-Centaurus and Perseus. It additionally incorporates a dense area often called the central bar. Our photo voltaic system lies on a extra modest construction referred to as the Orion spur.

Nonetheless tangled the query of our metaphorical place within the universe, we are able to use astronomy to understand Earth’s bodily location.

Earth orbits the solar at a distance of 150 million kilometres and the solar orbits the centre of the Milky Means. Particularly, we’re within the Orion arm, round 26,500 mild years from the centre.

The Milky Means resides within the Native Group of galaxies. About 2.5 million mild years away is our closest neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda, the most important galaxy within the Native Group. Proper now, we’re hurtling in direction of Andromeda at greater than 100 kilometres per second; in about 4 billion years, the 2 galaxies will collide.

The Native Group

That may shake up the Native Group,…