All about the galaxy

The milky way

The Milky Way is a huge collection of stars, dust and gas. It's called a spiral galaxy because, if you could view it from the top or bottom, it would look like a spinning pinwheel. The Sun is located on one of the spiral arms, about 25,000 light-years away from the center of the galaxy. Four billion years from now, our galaxy, the Milky Way, will collide with our large spiraling neighbor, Andromeda. The galaxies as we know them will not survive. In fact, our solar system is going to outlive our galaxy. The Sun will heat up, swell into a red giant, fuse helium in its core, then blow off its outer layers and contract into a white dwarf. But new stars will pop up, too, and shine, and keep the galaxy alive and rife with stars far into the future when the milky way dies out. A study published this weekend in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society proposes that the oldest star in the Milky Way is a faint white dwarf that is about 10.7 billion years old and shining roughly 90 light years away from Earth. And how fast is the Milky Way Galaxy moving? The speed turns out to be an astounding 1.3 million miles per hour (2.1 million km/hr)! We are moving roughly in the direction on the sky that is defined by the constellations of Leo and Virgo.