What is the shape of your galaxy and where is your solar system located within the galaxy?

Answer 1

The Milky Way galaxy is what's called a "barred spiral" galaxy; there are two "bars" of stars, and the spiral arms extend like a pinwheel from the bars. Scientists think it looks somewhat like NGC1300.

The Sun and our solar system are, we think, somewhere about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way out from the center, although from inside the Milky Way, it is challenging to determine exactly where we are. This is probably a good distance to be, since we believe that there is a supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way.

In about 4 billion years, our galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy, and we can only speculate about the eventual shape of the merged galaxy. We expect that several billions of stars with their attendant solar systems (if any) will be flung off into intergalactic space by the gravitational interactions. Our Sun, which will probably have become a red giant star by that time, might be one of them.