The Milky Way
The Milky Way is the name of the Spiral galaxy in which we live. It is made up of hundreds of billions of stars, including our sun.
The Milky Way looks like a gigantic cloud of stars, all very close together. But the distance between any two Milky Way stars varies.
Just as Earth moves around the sun, the sun and the other stars move around the centre of the galaxy. The galaxy is so big, and our sun is so far from its centre, that it takes the sun more than 250 million years to go all the way around.
Our Galaxy Neighbours
We live in the Milky Way Galaxy, but there are many other galaxies in the universe. Most of them are so far away that we can’t see them without a telescope. But there are three galaxies that we can see with just our eyes.
One of these is the Andromeda Galaxy. It is bigger than our own Milky Way Galaxy and contains more than 150 billion stars.
The other two galaxies we can see without a telescope are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. They can both be seen from the Southern Hemisphere.
The Magellanic Clouds, the Andromeda Galaxy, and our galaxy, along with others, form a group of about 30 galaxies called the Local Group. Beyond the Local Group lies a whole universe of galaxies!
Picture Credit : Google
