🌌 Galaxy
The Milky Way
Our home galaxy. The Sun is one of its hundreds of billions of stars.
- Size
- 100,000 light-years across
- Stars
- 100 to 400 billion
Did you know?
- The Sun takes about 230 million years to go once around it.
- Nobody can photograph the whole Milky Way from outside, because we are inside it.
Find it in the sky
Photographed or visited by
Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
Sweeps the whole sky for gamma rays, every three hours.
COBE
Photographed the afterglow of the Big Bang, and won a Nobel Prize.
Planck
Took the sharpest picture of the oldest light there is.
Gaia
Mapped nearly two billion stars, then switched itself off.
Compare the Milky Way with Andromeda GalaxySide by side, to scale, in the app
More NASA photos of the Milky WayStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of deep space
The Sun
Our star, an ordinary one that keeps everything here alive.
Betelgeuse
A red supergiant in Orion that will one day explode.
Alpha Centauri
The closest star system to the Sun.
Eta Carinae
A pair of giant stars, one of them about 90 times heavier than the Sun.
Mira
A red giant star racing through space with a tail like a comet.
Zeta Ophiuchi
A runaway star, flung out when its partner exploded.