The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System.
Its name "milky" is derived from its appearance as a dim glowing band
arching across the night sky whose individual stars cannot be
distinguished by the naked eye. From Earth the Milky Way appears as a band because its disk-shaped structure is viewed from within. Galileo Galilei
first resolved the band of light into individual stars with his
telescope in 1610. Until the early 1920s most astronomers thought that
the Milky Way contained all the stars in the Universe. Following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, observations by Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies—now known to number in the billions.
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy that has a diameter usually considered to be roughly 100,000–120,000 light-years but may be 150,000–180,000 light-years. The Milky Way is estimated to contain 100–400 billion stars, although this number may be as high as one trillion. There are probably at least 100 billion planets in the Milky Way. The Solar System is located within the disk, about 27,000 light-years from the Galactic Center, on the inner edge of one of the spiral-shaped concentrations of gas and dust called the Orion Arm. The stars in the inner ≈10,000 light-years form a bulge and one or more bars that radiate from the bulge. The very center is marked by an intense radio source, named Sagittarius A*, which is likely to be a supermassive black hole.
Stars and gases at a wide range of distances from the Galactic Center
orbit at approximately 220 kilometers per second. The constant rotation
speed contradicts the laws of Keplerian dynamics and suggests that much of the mass of the Milky Way does not emit or absorb electromagnetic radiation. This mass has been given the name "dark matter". The rotational period is about 240 million years at the position of the Sun.
The Milky Way as a whole is moving at a velocity of approximately
600 km per second with respect to extragalactic frames of reference. The
oldest stars in the Milky Way are nearly as old as the Universe itself
and thus must have formed shortly after the Big Bang.
The Milky Way has several satellite galaxies and is part of the Local Group of galaxies, which is a component of the Virgo Supercluster, which again is a component of the Laniakea Supercluster.
