THE MILKY WAY GALAXY

1. The Milky Way is estimated to be between 100,000 and 200,000 light-years across.

2. It rotates at a speed of 155 miles per second around its center.

3. The central region of the Milky Way contains over four million stars, some older than the Earth itself.

4. The Milky Way may contain as many as 400 billion stars and at least 100 billion planets or more.

5. Our Solar System resides in a gravitationally bound cluster called the Orion Arm which is located approximately 25000 light-years from the Galactic Core in the Sagittarius Arm of our galaxy.

6. There are an estimated 10 million other stars within a 10 light-year radius of our own Sun that could potentially be hosting satellites, including exoplanets capable of sustaining life on them!

7. Most stars in our galaxy orbit the center with an average velocity of 225 km/s, whereas our sun orbits with a velocity of 220 km/s. This means that in 1 billion years time we will have made almost one full revolution around the Galactic Centre! If you look directly at it from Earth’s surface or from space, you will see its innermost part glowing white but thinner spiral arms illuminated by young, blue stars emerging from it like rays emanating from a starburst pattern!

8. Our entire solar system is just one small part of an arm that wraps itself around the entiregalaxy and makes up only 0.1% of Milky Way’s mass—yet it contains roughly 30% of all the mass in the Milky Way because this arm happens to be densely populated with stars and gas clouds!

9. Though invisible to us directly due to dust obscuring its presence, astronomers can still measure amounts of dark matter inside our Galaxy through observing its gravitational effects on other visible objects! Through modern science and technology, they are slowly unraveling its mystique further every day! In fact they believe that dark matter plays an essential role in maintaining structure within galaxies like ours; though even today we still don’t know what this mysterious substance truly is!

10. Astronomers will soon begin observing some parts of the galactic halo—a vast spherical cloud composed mostly out hydrogen atoms stretching for countless light years beyond our galaxy—aimed at gaining new insights about aspects such as how these hydrogen atoms formed billions years ago and perhaps even whether any exotic dark matter particles exist there too!