The Milky Way is our home in the Universe. It is made up of over 200 billion stars, including the Sun, as well as large amounts of gas and dust. It looks like a giant spiral from above, but if it was viewed from the side it would appear as a flat band of stars. This is because the Milky Way is over 100,000 light years long, but only 2000 light years thick. The centre of the Milky Way is made up of a bright nucleus of old, cool stars. Emerging from the central galactic bulge are several spiral arms made up of gas, dust and young stars.
When you look up at the night sky, assuming conditions are just right, you might just catch a glimpse of a faint, white band reaching across the heavens. This band, upon closer observation, looks speckled and dusty, filled with a million tiny points of light and halos of glowing matter. What you are seeing is the Milky Way, something that astronomers and stargazers alike have been staring up at since the beginning of time.
But just what is the Milky Way? Well, simply put, it is the name of the barred spiral galaxy in which our solar system is located. The Earth orbits the Sun in the Solar System, and the Solar System is embedded within this vast galaxy of stars. It is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe, and ours is called the Milky Way because the disk of the galaxy appears to be spanning the night sky like a hazy band of glowing white light
Our Sun (a star) and all the planets around it are part of a galaxy known as the Milky Way Galaxy. A galaxy is a large group of stars, gas, and dust bound together by gravity. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The Milky Way is a large barred spiral galaxy. All the stars we see in the night sky are in our own Milky Way Galaxy. Our galaxy is called the Milky Way because it appears as a milky band of light in the sky when you see it in a really dark area.
Picture Credit : Google