Galaxies · Barred spiral galaxy
Milky Way
You are here · Light crosses it in 100,000 years
- Across
- 100,000 light-years
- Vs Earth
- Our home galaxy
- Mass
- 1.5 trillion Suns
Open Milky Way in Cosmic Scale
In the app, Milky Way is part of the Beyond pack.
About
Our galaxy: a barred spiral of a few hundred billion stars, with a supermassive black hole at its centre and the Sun about two-thirds of the way out. The band of light across a dark sky is its disk seen edge-on from the inside.
Home to 100–400 billion stars. The Sun takes 230 million years to go around once.
At a glance
| Diameter | About 100,000 light-years |
|---|---|
| Stars | 100–400 billion |
| Sun's distance | 26,000 light-years out |
| Sun's orbit | 230 million years |
Did you know
- We have never seen it from outside; its shape is worked out from painstaking surveys taken from within.
- It is on course to merge with Andromeda in about 4.5 billion years.
- Its disk is warped, probably by the pull of the Magellanic Clouds.
Simulations
- The Milky Way meets Andromeda — How our galaxy and its giant neighbour may merge into one, over billions of years
Real photo
- The whole Milky Way as seen from Earth, a 360° panorama — ESO/S. Brunier (CC BY 4.0) · source