Milky Way

This is some information i found on Wikipedia about Milky Way, our homeland.

"The Milky Way (a translation of the Latin Via Lactea, in turn derived from the Greek Γαλαξίας (Galaxias), sometimes referred to simply as "the Galaxy"), is a barred spiral galaxy which forms part of the Local Group. Although the Milky Way is but one of billions of galaxies in the universe, the Galaxy has special significance to humanity as it is the home of the solar system. Democritus (450 BC - 370 BC) was the first known person to claim that the Milky Way consists of distant stars.

View from Earth of a portion of the Milky Way near Sagittarius.
The term "milky" originates from the hazy band of white light appearing across the celestial sphere visible from Earth, which comprises stars and other material lying within the galactic plane. The galaxy appears brightest in the direction of Sagittarius, towards the galactic center.
Relative to the celestial equator, the Milky Way passes as far north as the constellation of Cassiopeia and as far south as the constellation of Crux, indicating the high inclination of Earth's equatorial plane and the plane of the ecliptic relative to the galactic plane. The fact that the Milky Way divides the night sky into two roughly equal hemispheres indicates that the solar system lies close to the galactic plane.
The main disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is about 80,000 to 100,000 light years in diameter, about 250-300 thousand light years in circumference, and outside the Galactic core, about 1,000 light years in thickness. It is composed of 200 to 400 billion stars . As a guide to the relative physical scale of the Milky Way, if the galaxy were reduced to 130 km (80 mi) in diameter, the solar system would be a mere 2 mm (0.08 in) in width. The Galactic Halo extends out to 250,000 to 400,000 light years in diameter. As detailed in the Structure section below, new discoveries indicate that the disk extends much farther than previously thought.


NASA artist's conception of the Milky Way Galaxy, viewed along its axis.
The Milky Way's absolute magnitude, which cannot be measured directly, is assumed by astronomical convention to be −20.5."