The Milky Way is our galaxy! A galaxy is a huge group of stars, planets, and dust all held together in space. Our Sun, Earth, and all the planets in our solar system live inside the Milky Way. On a very dark night away from city lights, you can see part of it. It looks like a glowing white band of light stretched across the sky.
If you could fly far, far away and look back at the Milky Way, you would see a giant spiral shape. It has long curving arms made of billions of stars. From Earth, we cannot see the spiral shape because we are inside it. Instead, we see a cloudy stripe of light across the night sky. The name “Milky Way” comes from how it looks. Long ago, people thought it looked like a splash of milk across the dark sky.
Our Sun is just one star out of hundreds of billions in the Milky Way. We live in one of the spiral arms, about halfway between the center and the edge. The center of the galaxy is very bright and full of stars. The whole galaxy is slowly spinning. It takes our Sun about 230 million years to go all the way around the center one time!
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