Milky Way

The Milky Way is our home galaxy — the huge, spinning group of stars and planets that we live inside! From Earth, it looks like a soft, hazy band of light in the night sky. That beautiful glow is made up of hundreds of billions of stars that are very far away.

Our Solar System sits about 27,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way, on the edge of a spiral arm called the Orion Arm. The galaxy is shaped like a huge fried egg with long, swirling arms made of stars, gas, and dust. Scientists think the very middle of the Milky Way holds a super heavy object called Sagittarius A*, which is a special kind of black hole.

Long ago, in 1610, a scientist named Galileo Galilei used a telescope and discovered that this hazy band of light was really made of countless tiny stars. People all around the world have looked up at the Milky Way and given it special names. In some places, it is called the “Silver River,” and in others, the “River of Heaven.” Each culture has its own beautiful way to describe this wonderful part of our sky.

The Milky Way is part of a group of galaxies called the Local Group, which includes our neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. These two giant galaxies might one day join together in the far future to create an even bigger galaxy!