What is the Milky Way? The Milky Way appears in the sky as a dim white patch, filled with stars and galaxies, which stretch across the night sky.

Milky Way

The Milky Way, with the Solar System ringed.

The Milky Way can only be seen in a clear sky in a place well away from the glare of street lamps.

If you look into the Milky Way with a telescope you can see a huge number of stars. The Milky Way is really a huge group of stars called a galaxy. It is known as the Milky Way Galaxy. If you could look down on it you would see that it looks like a catherine wheel slowly turning in space. The Sun is just one of 500,000 million stars, and is found towards the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy is so large that it takes light a hundred thousand years to cross it.

The Milky Way Galaxy is also slowly turning in space. It take 225 million years to turn round completely. This means that the last time the Solar System was in this part of space, the dinosaurs had not yet walked on the Earth.

The Milky Way, seen from Hawaii.

Video: The Milky Way, and how it formed over 8 billion years (NASA). If you scroll back this movie (playing it backwards, in effect), you will see how it began right up to the present.

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