The Milky Way

The Milky Way is the galaxy in which we would find the Solar System. The Sun is at the centre of this Solar System, with its eight planets orbiting it. There are millions of stars in the Milky Way, many of them with planets orbiting them. This means that the chance of there being another planet like Earth, orbiting a star like the Sun, is quite high. It is 100,000 Light Years (950,000,000,000,000,000 kilometres) from one side of the Milky Way to the other. Because the Solar System is quite near to the edge of the Milky Way, we can look into its Galactic Centre and see lots of stars clustered together, as shown in the picture below.

The Milky Way, like many other galaxies, is a Spiral Galaxy, meaning that it has a dense area of stars in its centre glowing brightly, and arms spinning in a spiral around it, taking 225,000,000 Earth years to complete a full rotation.