THE MILKY WAY

The milky way is a part of group of galaxies held together by gravity, called the local group. It can be seen as a hazy band of light stretching across the night sky. It has a central bulge, a disk, and a halo. The halo and bulge contain old stars and the disk is filled with gas, dust, and young stars. There may be a huge black hole in the middle of the milky way. There are about 200,000 million stars in the milky way, and are sun is one of theses Stars. The sun is about halfway out from the center, on one of the spiral arms of the galaxy. It is revolving around the center of the galaxy at a speed of half a million miles per hour, yet it will take 200 million years to go around once. The milky way is currently eating several other galaxies, ripping them into long, curving arcs of stars that orbits its center. The stars we can see around us on a dark night are only 0.000003% of the total number of stars in the milky way.