The Milky Way is the barred spiral galaxy that contains the Solar System. One circuit of our system around the galaxy takes about 230 million years, so Earth has completed only about twenty galactic years since it formed.
Scale Comparison
Milky Way vs Andromeda
Explore the scaleAndromeda's quoted visible diameter is about 1.5 times the Milky Way's stellar-disk diameter.
Shared physical scale
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Andromeda’s quoted visible diameter is about 1.5 times the Milky Way’s stellar-disk diameter.
Galaxy edges are definitions, not surfaces. Faint stellar halos and dark-matter halos extend beyond both plotted disks, and estimates change with the tracer and brightness threshold used.
Objects
Object details and sources
Andromeda is the nearest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way and one of the two dominant galaxies in the Local Group. It is approaching us, but current Hubble and Gaia data leave only about a 50 percent chance of a collision within the next 10 billion years.
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About
Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.
Guides explain selected parts of that range, while focused views filter the objects by subject.