SpazeOur galaxy, a barred spiral
Milky Way
Home. A barred spiral of 100 to 400 billion stars. The Sun sits in a minor arm, 26,670 light years from the centre, and takes 230 million years to go round once.
- Width
- ~105,000 light years
- Stars
- 100–400 billion
- Sun’s lap
- 230 million years
- Centre
- Sagittarius A*
Made of
- Dark matter 90%
- Stars 9%
- Gas and dust 1%
Hundreds of billions of stars in a halo of dark matter
Modelled from rotation curves and star counts