Milky Way

The galaxy that we call home, the Milky Way, is a barred spiral galaxy with a diameter of about 200,000 light-years. Home to more than 100 billion stars and more than 100 billion planets, Earth is merely one of the many worlds to exist in this galactic bungalow. The Milky Way gets its name from the hazy band of light that we can see in the very dark sky, which is the view of the disk-shape structure from our Earth-bound perspective. Since it is not possible to take a picture of the Milky Way as a whole, the image on the right is a simulation of what we think the Milky Way looks like.