The Milky Way

The Milky Way is a galaxy of the Local Group, and home to the Solar System.

It is a barred spiral of some hundreds of billions of stars, about a hundred thousand light-years across. Seen from Earth, it is the pale band of light that crosses the night sky. The Sun lies far out from its center, in one of the lesser spiral arms. The Kitties’ Paw lies within it as well.

William Herschel was the first to attempt its shape. Counting the stars in hundreds of patches of sky, he published a map of it in 1785 AD.