Cosmic Exploration · galaxy
Milky Way
Barred spiral · here
- Morphology
- Barred spiral
- Mass
- 2.3868e+42
- Type
- Galaxy
- Dec (deg)
- 0
- Distance from Earth
- 0
- Diameter (ly)
- 105000
- RA (deg)
- 0
- Subgroup
- Milky Way
- Coordinates
- origin — we are inside it
Notes
Our own galaxy: a barred spiral of a few hundred billion stars, with a 4.3-million-solar-mass black hole at the centre and a dark halo that outweighs everything visible by five to one. We see it edge-on from inside, which is why its shape took until the 1920s to establish.
Open on the Cosmic Exploration shelf — the interactive card, the filters, and everything alongside it.