Blast off to discover amazing facts about our galactic home!
Welcome, space explorer! 👨🚀👩🚀 Our Milky Way galaxy is a huge collection of stars, planets, gas, and dust. It's so big that light takes 100,000 years to travel across it! Tap on the cards below to learn cosmic facts.
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy containing 100-400 billion stars! Our Sun is just one of them.
From Earth, we see it as a hazy band of light because we're looking at the galaxy edge-on from inside it!
The Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across. That's 587,849,981,000,000,000 miles!
If you could drive across it at highway speed (60mph), it would take you over 1 trillion years!
Our Solar System is in the Orion Arm, about 27,000 light-years from the galactic center.
We orbit the center at 514,000 mph! Even at that speed, one orbit takes 230 million years!
A supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* (say "A-star") sits at the center!
It's 4 million times heavier than our Sun but don't worry - it's 27,000 light-years away and won't suck us in!
The Milky Way began forming about 13.6 billion years ago, shortly after the Big Bang!
Our Sun is much younger - only about 4.6 billion years old. The galaxy was already middle-aged when our Sun was born!
Scientists estimate there may be 100 million planets in our galaxy that could support life!
We've discovered over 5,000 exoplanets so far, and new ones are found almost every day!