Milky Way
Our home galaxy, a barred spiral of hundreds of billions of stars.
The Milky Way
Image: ESO/S. Brunier · CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab)
From inside, we see the Milky Way edge-on, as a band of light across the night sky. The Solar System sits in one of its spiral arms, about halfway out from the centre, where a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* lives.
Key facts
- Type
- Barred spiral galaxy
- Diameter
- About 100,000 light-years
- Stars
- 100–400 billion