Top 6 Most Interesting Facts About the Milky Way Galaxy

Our planet and our Sun, and all of our neighboring stars all reside in the Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way is a large spiral armed galaxy and is just one of the many - perhaps around 100 billion galaxies - that reside in the larger Universe as a whole. There's still much to uncover about our own Galaxy and everything inside of it, but here are some interesting facts that should get you started in understanding a bit more about it.

Top 6 Interesting Facts About the Milky Way Galaxy

1. Yes, The "Milky Way" is Real: When you look to the sky in a secluded setting and find a cloudy, lightly colored band working its way across the sky you are looking at the Milky Way. It's actually the Galactic disk of our galaxy, which is the flattened portion of our galaxy which contains most of its stars.

2. Everything Rotates the Galaxy's Center: The moon orbits around the planet, the planets orbit around the sun, but what about matter at a larger scale? Everything rotates around the strong gravitational pull of the Galactic center. In the area of our sun, our solar system will orbit around the entire Galaxy in a period of about 225 million years.

3. 90 Billion Suns? The mass of the Milky Way Galaxy is estimated to be the mass of about 90 billion suns, which can be determined by using an equation with the orbital distance and time of matter around its center. Most of this is dark matter however, as opposed to luminous stars.

4. Sgr A*: Sgr A* (read as Saj A Star) is the name for the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy. Our Galactic nucleus isn't very large or powerful compared to those found in some other galaxies, however it's still immense, producing 1 million times more energy than our sun, enclosed in a size that's about 10 AU, or astronomical units (measured as the distance of Earth's orbit around the sun).

5. Our 2 Companions: The Milky Way galaxy has two companions of sorts, the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Large Magellanic Cloud. These are two irregular dwarf galaxies that actually orbit the Milky Way, which is a much larger and more massive spiral galaxy.

6. Don't Plan Any Trips: In case you're excited about Galactic travel, you shouldn't get your hopes up too high. Distances on these scales are measured in parsecs, one parsec being equivalent to about 3.26 light years, which is of course the distance covered by light over a year at a speed of about 300,000 meters per second. Well, our galaxy has an estimated size of about 30,000 parsecs, or nearly 100,000 light years. Our solar system resides about 8,000 parsecs from the Galactic center.

Source: Chaisson and McMillan, Astronomy Today, Sixth Edition. 2008.