What Is The Milky Way?

Look at the night sky and you see hundreds upon hundreds of stars.

 What you see as a star, may be one of many things. A star can be like our fiery sun and may probably have planets circling around it. But because of the considerable amount of miles it is away from us, it appears to be no larger than a pinhead. Thereby, it's revolving and rotating planets can not be seen at all.
Sometimes, it is not really a star, but a planet reflecting the rays of the sun, like the planet Venus which we literally see almost every night, but pay little or no attention to it. And sometimes, we may also see a hazy spot which appears to us as a huge cloud of stars.

 This collection of stars is commonly known as a Galaxy. Most of the time, astronomers with powerful telescopes can study distant galaxies we can't even see.

What Is The Milky Way? 

Some galaxies are shaped like gigantic wheels. Our galaxy is wheel-shaped, and our sun lies just close to the edge. The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System. The descriptive "milky" is derived from the appearance from Earth of the galaxy – a band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that have existed over long periods. We See nearer suns as stars in the hub of the wheel and beyond. This white area in the sky in one and narrow, and looks like a path or way, hence its name; the Milky Way.

In other words, the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with a diameter between 100,000 and 180,000 light-years. The Milky Way is estimated to contain 100–400 billion stars.There are probably at least 100 billion planets in the Milky Way. And with all these, humanity still needs large leaps towards the discovery of extraterrestrial life, and with each star in our galaxy having at least one habitable planet revolving around them, there are more questions to be put forward, which may in fact, remain unanswered for centuries.