The Milky Way

Our home galaxy, a barred spiral with hundreds of billions of stars.

Panorama of the whole night sky with the band of the Milky Way across the middle.
The Milky Way panorama. Credit: ESO/S. Brunier. Source, CC BY 4.0.

The Milky Way is our home galaxy. From a dark place on Earth it looks like a faint band of light across the sky: the combined light of billions of stars too distant to see one by one.

Facts

  • It is a barred spiral galaxy about 100,000 light-years across.
  • It contains an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars.
  • The Sun lies about 26,000 light-years from the centre and needs about 230 million years for one orbit.
  • At its centre is the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*.

The panorama above shows the whole sky, made from photographs taken in Chile and the Canary Islands. The dark lanes in the bright band are clouds of dust that block the light of the stars behind them.