The Milky Way from The beauty of the heavens : a pictorial display of the astronomical phenomena of the universe

The beauty of the heavens : a pictorial display of the astronomical phenomena of the universe : one hundred and four coloured scenes, illustrating a familiar lecture on astronomy

The Milky Way

The Milky Way Galaxy is where we are all home. Like billions of other galaxies in the Universe, the Milky Way is a collection of all the stars, dust, planets, and objects bound together by gravity. It contains over 200 billions stars, more than half of them older than the 4.5-billion-year-old Sun. The Milky Way is in the shape of a spiral, and it’s close to 100,000 light-years across. It’s called the Milky Way because, when you look up into the night sky, it appears as a broad, shimmering, milky river of stars. This band of stars has been visible since the Earth’s formation. It is constantly rotating, bringing the sun, planets, and solar system with it throughout the Universe. Even at its speed of travel, 515,000 miles per hour, the solar system would take 230 million years to cross the Milky Way!