The Milky Way
Discover amazing facts about the Milky Way galaxy, our incredible cosmic home containing billions of stars, planets, and mysteries
The Milky Way appears as a bright band of stars stretching across the night sky on clear, dark nights
PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA/JPL-Caltech/S. Stolovy (Spitzer Science Center/Caltech)
The Milky Way is our incredible cosmic home - a massive spiral galaxy containing over 200 billion stars, including our Sun! When you look up at a really dark sky on a clear night, you can actually see part of our galaxy stretching across the heavens like a bright, cloudy river of stars. Ancient people called it the "Milky Way" because it looked like spilled milk across the sky. Our entire solar system is just a tiny speck located in one of the galaxy's spiral arms, about 26,000 light-years away from the galactic center.
The Milky Way is shaped like a giant pinwheel with beautiful spiral arms curving outward from a bright central bulge. If you could somehow fly above our galaxy and look down, it would look like a cosmic hurricane made of stars! The galaxy is incredibly vast - it's about 100,000 light-years across, which means light takes 100,000 years to travel from one side to the other. At the very center of our galaxy lurks a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* that weighs as much as 4 million Suns!
Our galaxy is constantly moving and changing. The Milky Way spins like a giant wheel, but different parts rotate at different speeds - our solar system takes about 225 million years to complete one orbit around the galactic center. New stars are being born in the galaxy's spiral arms while old stars are dying and creating beautiful nebulae. Scientists estimate that the Milky Way creates about 2-3 new stars every year from the gas and dust scattered throughout its spiral arms.
