1. Most people refer to this as either the Milky Way or Galaxy.
  2. The Milky Way is where Earth and our Solar System are located.
  3. Aristotle, in his Meteorologica, suggested that the Milky Way may be made up of distant stars.
  4. Galileo provided proof that the Milky Way did consist of stars when he used his telescope.
  5. The Milky Way contains approximately a minimum of 100 billion stars and a maximum of 400 billion.
  6. Similar to other galaxies, the Milky Way contains a bulge, disk, and halo.
  7. The bulge in the center of the Milky Way is said to contain old stars.
  8. The halo of the Milky Way is believed is said to contain dark matter and globular clusters.
  9. The disk is said to be made of young stars, dust, and gas.
  10. The Milky Way is known as a binary system.
  11. Other Dwarf Galaxies orbit the Milky Way.
  12. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy.
  13. Looking up at the night sky, all the visible stars you see are part of the Milky Way Galaxy.
  14. The Milky Way’s center can be located in the direction of Sagittarius (Right Ascension = 19h / declination = “25”)
  15. The Milky Way’s size is about 30 kilo parsecs (100,000 light years) in diameter.
  16. The Milky Way’s thickness as we view it from earth is nearly 3,000 light years (just like a CD).
  17. The distance between the Milky Way’s center and Sun is estimated to be 25,000 to 28,000 (This estimate is still debatable)
  18. There are spiral arms (or at least they look like arms) coming out from the center of the Milky Way.
  19. In November 2010, researchers said that they discovered two large spherical bubbles of energy that are exploding to the north and south of the Milky Way’s center.
  20. It will take the Sun, along with the Solar System, more or less 220,000,000 years to make a complete rotation around the Milky Way.
  21. Scientists have said that the Milky Way is a member of galaxies named the Local Group
  22. The Andromeda Galaxy is a similar galaxy as the Milky Way.
  23. No one can really say how old the Milky Way is, guess-timates put it at about 13 billion years old.
  24. The Latin translation for Milky Way is Via Lactea.
  25. The Greek word for Galaxy is Galaxias or ????????.