Key facts
- Category
- Galaxies
- Object class
- Barred spiral galaxy
- Composition
- ~100–400 billion stars, gas, dust, dark matter
- Scale fact
- 100,000 lystellar disk diameter
- Estimated age
- ~13.6 billion years
- Host
- Local Group
Milky Way
100,000 lystellar disk diameter
Details
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.
The Milky Way is the galaxy we live inside, so no telescope can photograph it face-on as a whole. The bright band across Earth’s sky is an edge-on view through part of its disk; maps of the barred spiral must instead be reconstructed from distances, motions, and other measurements of stars and gas.
That interior position gives astronomers detailed access to individual stars and clouds, but dust blocks visible light across much of the disk and overlapping structures confuse the view. Gaia maps the galaxy star by star, and its data continue to revise even the number and prominence of the spiral arms.
Links
- Preset views
- Wikipedia
- Milky Way on Wikipedia
- Universe journey
- Milky Way
Size neighbors
Objects near Milky Way on the scale
On the logarithmic size axis, Milky Way falls between Sombrero Galaxy and Centaurus A. The band uses nearby Barred spiral galaxy records.
Shared physical scale
116,235ly
Sources
References for Milky Way
Measurements and descriptive context are compiled by the Scale of Space team from the references below. If you find an error, please let us know.
- Milky Way — Wikipedia
- Visual reference: ESA Gaia (Gaia 2025 / ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)
Continue with nearby objects or open the full scale.
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.