Milky Way Galaxy
The Milky Way Galaxy, commonly referred to as just the Milky Way, or sometimes simply as the Galaxy, is the galaxy in which the Solar system is located. The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy that is part of the Local Group of galaxies. It is one of billions of galaxies in the observable universe. Its name is a translation of the Latin Via Lactea, in turn translated from the Greek, Galaxias, referring to the pale band of light formed by stars in the galactic plane as seen from Earth.
Some sources hold that, strictly speaking, the term Milky Way should refer exclusively to the band of light that the galaxy forms in the night sky, while the galaxy should receive the full name Milky Way Galaxy, or alternatively the Galaxy. However, it is unclear how widespread this convention is, and the term Milky Way is routinely used in either context.
The stellar disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is approximately 100,000 light-years (30 kiloparsecs, 9×1017 km) in diameter, and is considered to be, on average, about 1,000 ly (0.3 kpc) thick. It is estimated to contain at least 200 billion stars and possibly up to 400 billion stars, the exact figure depending on the number of very low-mass stars, which is highly uncertain. This can be compared to the one trillion (1012) stars of the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy. The stellar disc does not have a sharp edge, a radius beyond which there are no stars. Rather, the number of stars drops smoothly with distance from the centre of the Galaxy. Beyond a radius of roughly 40,000 ly (12 kpc) the number of stars drops much faster with radius, for reasons that are not understood.
The galaxy consists of a bar-shaped core region surrounded by a disk of gas,dust and stars forming four distinct arm structures spiralling outward in a logarithmic spiral shape. The mass distribution within the galaxy closely resembles the Sbc Hubble classification, which is a spiral galaxy with relatively loosely wound arms. Astronomers first began to suspect that the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy, rather than an ordinary spiral galaxy, in the 1990s.Their suspicions were confirmed by the Spitzer Space Telescope observations in 2005 which showed the galaxy's central bar to be larger than previously suspected.