The Milky Way Is Home
That faint river of light across a dark sky is our own galaxy, seen edge-on from the inside.
What’s going on
The Milky Way is a flat, barred spiral of perhaps 100 billion stars or more, about 100,000 light-years across, and our Solar System sits about halfway out from its centre. Look along the flat disc and countless distant stars blur into one glowing band, crossed by dark lanes of dust. Look out of the disc and you see only scattered stars. Every single star you can see by eye belongs to the Milky Way.
Myth
The Milky Way is a long cloud in our sky.
Fact
It is the light of billions of distant stars, too faint to see one by one.
Learn more
NASA Imagine the Universe, “The Milky Way Galaxy” (imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov).
Look up tonight
Go somewhere dark on a night without a bright Moon, give your eyes 20 minutes, and look for a faint, cloudy band across the sky.
Play Myth or Fact? Read out either the sentence on the card or the myth above. Can everyone tell which is true?
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