Which galaxies do people think are most similar to the Milky Way?

Messier 83 galaxy is sometimes called Nanfengche galaxy, and sometimes called the "little cousin" of the Milky Way. Its diameter is only half that of our Milky Way, only 55,000 light years, but people think its structure is very similar. View: 20 14 65438+28 October: or look for it in the spring sky of hydra in the northern hemisphere.

There is NGC 6744, which is twice the diameter of the Milky Way, but it is also said to be very similar (twins! This distant galaxy looks like our Milky Way. It is located in the constellation Paavo and cannot be seen in most parts of the northern hemisphere. Look here: ApoD: 2065438+August 8, 2004. It even has an irregular dwarf galaxy (at the lower left of the picture below), which is very similar to one in the Magellanic Cloud.

The third galaxy named UGC 12 158 is located in Pegasus, which is much farther than the other two galaxies, with a diameter of140,000 light years, larger than the Milky Way, but also very similar in structure (the Milky Way is (almost) the same twin-bad astronomy). Look at this: the screw rod is bare …

By contrast, this is what the Milky Way looks like from the outside. As others have pointed out, in the 1990s, astronomers modified their galaxy models, from spiral galaxies to rod spiral galaxies.

Andromeda galaxy is very close to us. It is speculated that it will hit us in about 3 billion years, very similar to us, but slightly larger. It was once thought that it had twice as many stars as the Milky Way, but this estimate has recently been lowered. However, Andromeda will not be reclassified as a "dwarf galaxy" like Pluto. Both the Milky Way and Andromeda are considered spiral galaxies.

The mass distribution inside the Milky Way is very similar to the Sbc type in Hubble classification, which represents a spiral galaxy with relatively loose spiral arms. In the 1990s, astronomers began to suspect that the Milky Way is a rod-shaped spiral galaxy, rather than an ordinary spiral galaxy.