Milky Way Galaxy

How galaxies evolve with Dr. Sarah Sweet

Realize that there are probably about 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe...there may be more, perhaps infinite. All these galaxies can range from dwarf size with as few as ten million stars to giants with a hundred trillion stars. And for each of these stars there are probably planets and moons orbiting around them.


Beyond the Pale Blue Dot of Earth is the galaxy it belongs to. Here is a layout of what we believe our Milky Way Galaxy looks like. If you look below the center of this image and find the "Orion Spur" (Above Perseus' Arm), then the Sun of our Solar System is just above it. The Sun is huge and about 99.9% of the mass of the solar system. The Milky Way galaxy is around 100,000 light years across. One light year is about 6 trillion miles.

When_Gallaxies_Collide Supermassive_Black_Hole

Hubble eXtreme versus size of the Moon

Galaxy filament structure Black Holes Filament Galaxies Needle Galaxy The Great Attractor

Andrea Ghez - Supermassive Black Holes

Infrared Universe Space Sounds

Supermassive Black Holes of NGC 6240

X-Rays from the Galactic Core

Magellanic Stream

Feel like taking a spin around the solar system? NASA's Eyes on the Solar System will take you to the planets and even to some of the moons, like Saturn's Enceladus.

This is an image of our Milky Way Galaxy's center from the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope

This is the Hubble eXtreme deep field image, taken from hubblesite.org, that shows a very small spot of outer space within the constellation Fornax. The image was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photos. What you're looking at here is about 5,500 galaxies. For a closer look click on the image.