The Milky Way is a big, shiny river of stars in the sky! 🌟 It looks like a white cloud at night, but it's actually made of billions of stars, just like our Sun. 🌞
We live inside the Milky Way, so when we look up, we see it as a bright band across the sky. It's like being inside a giant sparkly whirlpool! 🌀
The Milky Way is our home galaxy—a huge collection of stars, planets, gas, and dust held together by gravity. 🌠 It's shaped like a spinning disk with spiral arms, and our Solar System is located in one of these arms.
At night, we see the Milky Way as a hazy band of light because we're looking at it from the inside. There are so many stars that they blend together like a glowing river! 🌊✨
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy about 100,000 light-years across, containing between 100–400 billion stars! 🌌 Our Solar System orbits the galaxy's center at a speed of about 515,000 mph (828,000 km/h), taking roughly 230 million years to complete one revolution.
The galaxy has four main spiral arms and a supermassive black hole at its center called Sagittarius A*. The Milky Way is part of the Local Group of galaxies, which includes Andromeda—our closest galactic neighbor.
We see it as a misty band because we're inside its disk. The dark patches are dust clouds blocking starlight, while the brightest regions are star clusters and nebulae.