The Milky Way, also known as the Milky Way Galaxy, is the galaxy that contains our Solar System. Its name comes from its appearance in the night sky—an irregular, hazy band of light formed by countless distant stars that are too far away to be seen individually with the naked eye. The Milky Way is estimated to contain between 100 and 400 billion stars, along with at least as many planets. Our Solar System is located about 27,000 light-years (8.3 kiloparsecs) from the Galactic Center, positioned on the inner edge of the Orion Arm—one of the galaxy's spiral arms, composed of gas, dust, and stars.

At the heart of the galaxy lies a dense region known as the bulge, spanning roughly 10,000 light-years, and it includes one or more elongated bar structures extending outward. The center of this region, called Sagittarius A*, is a powerful radio source that marks the location of a supermassive black hole with a mass of approximately 4.1 million times that of the Sun. Some of the oldest stars in the Milky Way are nearly as ancient as the Universe itself, likely forming shortly after the cosmic Dark Ages that followed the Big Bang.

Source: Wikipedia