Milky Way Galaxy

We - as in the Solar System, are located about 25,000 light years from the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy and about 25,000 light years from the edge.

The Sun and the rest of the Solar System are close to the inner rim of the galaxy's Orion Arm, in the Local Fluff inside the Local Bubble, and in the Gould Belt.

As a picture is better than words, see related link for an artists impression.

The milky way is classified as a galaxy...

A barred spiral galaxy.

Yes, I believe I have seen it before on a trip to keywest. It's tough to pinpoint my exact location at the time, but we were driving close to midnight and stopped on the 7-mile bridge to look at the ocean at night. To our surprise, it was an amazingly clear night and when we looked up into the heavens the Milky Way was brilliantly shining across the southern sky.

The coldest place in the Universe is in the Boomerang Nebula, a cloud of dust and gases 5,000 light years from Earth. It has a temperature of -457. F (-272 C) and is formed by the rapid expansion of gas and dust flowing away form its central aging star.

Now, let's get serious. There are no aliens known to exist, just a bunch of anecdotes, and no matter how high you stack anecdotes, they never become evidence. We hope there is other life out there, and we consider it likely. But someone has to be the first form of intelligent life in the universe, and there is no evidence that it isn't us.

This is impossible to know, although some may know how to make an educated guess. We don't know the precise number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and we are just now learning how to locate planets orbiting relatively close stars. So far, the planets we have discovered are very large and Jupiter-like. This is not because that is the only kind of planet there is outside of our own system; it's because the very large and relatively near-by planets are the only ones we can currently detect. It may be thousands of years before we have a decent idea how many moons there are in our galaxy. We may never know.

Gravity. All the stars orbit around a super massive black hole in the center of the galaxy. The black hole and all the other stars in the galaxy are gravitationally bound, but not necessarily locked, and travel through the universe together.

Depends on what you define as "big" or "small"... The nearest star from our Solar System, Toliman (Alpha Centauri), is 4 light-years away. This is already an incredible distance, by our standards; each light-year has almost 10 million million kilometers. It would take our current spacecraft thousands of years to reach there.

The diameter of our galaxy (the Milky Way), however, is about 100,000 light-years - about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 km., 10 to the power 18.

Yes. The Milky Way is the name we give to our galaxy. All the stars we can see are in our own galaxy, so all the constellations we see are part of the Milky Way. At certain parts of the night sky we can see a dusty pattern through the sky which most people call the Milky Way. However, it is just part of it, and every star we can see is part of the Milky Way too, including the Sun and all the planets and of course Earth.

It is not. On the other hand, the Milky way sun creates the halo. When you see milky from above, it is diffucult to notice the halo. If you shift or rotate the view, you can see that the Milky way halo is a cicurference with the sun in the center and it covers all planets circling this sun.

The term galactic halo is used to denote an extended, roughly spherical component of a galaxy, which extends beyond the main, visible component. It can refer to any of several distinct components which share these properties

The milky way is approximately 100,000 light years across and 1,000 ly thick at the thickest part.

1 mile = 63,360 inches

1 ly = 9.461×1015 miles.

So 1,000 ly = 9.461 x 1018 miles = 5.99x1023 inches thick.

100,000 ly = 9.461 x 1020 miles = 5.99x1025 inches across.

The Milky Way stretches through various constellations, so it does not belong to any one of them.

No. The Milky Way galaxy is just one of billions of galaxies in the Universe. Just like there are billions of planets in the Milky Way Galaxy, there are also comparable numbers of planets in other galaxies.

The Milky Way is part of the Local Group, which is part of the Virgo Supercluster.

Yes, as far as we can tell (it is difficult to see when you are in it) the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with at least four spiral arms. It is a disk of about 400 billion stars 1,000 light years thick with a diameter of about 100,000 light years.

The bar in the center of the spiral rotates every 15 to 18 million years, while the spiral arm pattern (these are a pressure wave effect) rotates every 50 million years. Our sun which is 26,000 light-years form the center, rotates about the galactic core (the galactic center harbors a compact object of very large mass, strongly suspected to be a supermassive black hole ) once every 220 million years.

There are all kinds of stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Our sun is a G2V type star. There are red giants, blue giants, white dwarfs, red dwarfs, brown dwarfs, and probably even black dwarfs (burned out suns), neutron stars, and pulsars. There are also herbig-haro objects, a peculiar type of star that emits collimated bipolar jets of radiation.

By the current best estimates, no. The sun will likely enter its red giant stage in about 5 billion years. The collision with the Andromeda galaxy is expected to occur in 3 to 4 billion years.

No. We are in the outer portion of the Milky way about 3/4 of the way to the edge. The center of the Milky Way could not sustain life.

A disk has multiple speeds - at it's perfect center it's standing still (as you approach the center the speed gets smaller and smaller as you approach 0) At the outer rim (where our star Sol and it's attending planets) are rotating around the galaxy center at about 500,000 mph, ~0.0007% of the speed of light.

Probably the furthest "named" object would be Sagittarius A a supernova remnant at about 30,000 light years.

The furthest object would be on the other side of the Galaxy at about 75,000 light years and could be a star, a nebula or just a grain of dust.

The Milky Way contains somewhere around 200 billion stars. These stars account for about 20% of the visible mass of the galaxy, the other 80% being interstellar gas.

However, most of the matter in our galaxy is of a form we have not yet identified, and we call it "dark matter." We don't know what it is, but we can measure its effect on the rotation rate of the stars, and we can calculate the distribution of the dark matter.

Estimated at around 25-30 thousand Light Years away

The milky way galaxy is a barred spiral shaped galaxy.