Solar HTML - Cosmic Database

The Milky Way

The faint band of light crossing the night sky, consisting of stars in the plane of our Galaxy.

The name Milky Way is often used for the Galaxy itself. It is a spiral galaxy, about 100,000 light years in diameter, containing at least 100 billion stars.

The nearest stars to our own are:

Proxima Centauri	4.28 LightYears
Alpha Centauri	4.37 LightYears
Alpha Centauri B	4.37 LightYears
Barnard's Star	5.90 LightYears
Wolf 359	7.60L ightYears
Lalande 21185	8.13 LightYears
Sirius	8.80 LightYears
Sirius B	8.80 LightYears
Luytwn 726-8 A	8.88 LightYears
UV Ceti	8.88 LightYears

The Sun is in one of the Milky Way's spiral arms, about 30,000 light years from the centre. One complete rotation of the galaxy takes 225 million years.

The Milky Way is a member of a small cluster, the Local Group, and is just one of many galaxies in the universe.