Is milky way larger than Jupiter?

Answer 1

Yes. The Milky Way is a Galaxy which contains many many many solar systems. The stellar disk of the Milky Way galaxy is approximately 100,000 light years in diameter, and is believed to be, on average, about 1,000 light years 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. Extending beyond the stellar disk is a much thicker disk of gas. Recent observations indicate that the gaseous disk of the Milky Way has a thickness of around 12,000 light years - twice the previously accepted value. As a guide to the relative physical scale of the Milky Way, if it were reduced to 130 km (80 mi) in diameter, the Solar System would be a mere 2 mm (0.08 inches) in width

Answer 2

Yes, the Milky Way is much larger than Jupiter. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy that contains billions of stars, while Jupiter is a planet in our solar system. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years in diameter, while Jupiter is only about 86,881 miles in diameter.

Answer 3

No.

It's much much much bigger.

The sheer size of the Milky Way is truly mind boggling. While most things can be usually measured into something a human can at least try to put into perspective, some things are so big that their actual size is... well... nearly inconceivable.

The diameter of the Earth is 'only' about 7,926 miles. That means if you were to stand on the equator and drill through the entire Earth and come out on exactly the opposite side, you'd need a drill bit just under 8,000 miles long.

Now consider this.

Light travels at about 186,000 miles a second. That means that if you were to shine a light through the earth, it would reach all the way through and hit the moon (that's 238,857 miles away, almost thirty times the diameter of our planet) in barely over a second.

The Milky Way, on the other hand, is a little over 100,000 light years across.

While what makes for a 'light year' can itself be healthily debated, it's generally accepted that it's about 5,878,630,000,000 miles long, give or take the amount of vacuum that's in space. So even if the Milky Way was only ONE light year across, that's still 734,828,750 times bigger than we are... Nearer enough to 1 billion times bigger than the size of the Earth. Multiply that by 100,000 times, and NOW you're starting to begin to see the picture. It's not unlike comparing something just a few atoms across to the size of our sun. Once you scale up that much, it's really just theoretical.

Rounding the math down at nearly every opportunity, it's fair enough to say that the Earth is about a thousand trillion times smaller than the size of the Milky Way, or one million million million times smaller.

Answer 4

The universe is the largest in this hierarchy. The "universe" is everything. Within the universe, there are millions, perhaps billions, of individual galaxies, of which the Milky Way is one, and not the largest. (Although, we believe that the Milky Way is "larger than average".)

Our solar system is one of many within the Milky Way. Astronomers used to debate whether planetary systems such as our solar systems would be commonly found, or if ours was somehow unique. But in the last 5 years, advances in telescopes and technology have given us the ability to detect planets orbiting other stars. So far, we've found over 500, and the search is just beginning.

Answer 5

No. Our solar system along with many other solar systems make up the milky way galaxy. So no, the Milky Way galaxy is larger than our solar system.

Answer 6

The Milky Way is a galaxy. It is bigger than most other galaxies, but it is not the biggest.

Answer 7

Jupiter is within the Milky Way, so yes.

The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across.

Jupiter is about 0.5 light seconds across.

Answer 8

It's not huge, but it's almost certainly larger than "most" in the sense that it's above average.

Answer 9

yes. Galaxies contain solar systems.

Answer 10

The Milky Way IS a galaxy.