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The galaxy we live in is too massive for our brains to really process. Here are 5 facts about the Milky Way.
1. There’s a supermassive black hole right at the center
Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, has a mass equivalent to millions of suns — and the first direct image of it was only captured in 2022, by a global network of radio telescopes.
2. Our Solar System is just a “neighborhood” in a huge city
The Milky Way has between 100 and 400 billion stars, according to NASA estimates. The Sun is just one of them, located in a spiral arm relatively far from the galactic center.
3. The whole galaxy is spinning — and we’re spinning with it
The Solar System orbits the center of the Milky Way at roughly 828,000 km/h, but even at that speed, it takes about 230 million years to complete one full orbit.
4. The Milky Way is going to collide with another galaxy (billions of years from now)
The Andromeda galaxy is moving toward the Milky Way, and the collision is predicted to happen in about 4 billion years — plenty of time to not worry about it.
5. We only see a fraction of the stars in our own galaxy
From Earth, with the naked eye, we can only see a few thousand stars — a tiny fraction of the hundreds of billions that exist in the Milky Way, most hidden by cosmic dust and distance.
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