maitotieihin

Maitotieihin refers to the Milky Way, our home galaxy. It is a vast collection of stars, gas, dust, and dark matter held together by gravity. Our Sun is just one of billions of stars within the Milky Way, located in one of its spiral arms, the Orion Arm. The visible band of light we often see in the night sky, especially away from city lights, is the concentrated disc of stars in our galaxy's core.

The Milky Way is classified as a barred spiral galaxy, meaning it has a bar-shaped structure of stars across its center. From our perspective on Earth, we are inside this disc, looking outwards. This internal viewpoint makes it difficult to determine the exact shape and size of the galaxy. Scientists estimate the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years in diameter and contains between 100 to 400 billion stars.

At the center of the Milky Way lies a supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, with a mass millions of times that of our Sun. The galaxy rotates, with stars and other celestial objects orbiting this central point. Our solar system takes approximately 230 million years to complete one orbit. The Milky Way is part of a local group of galaxies and is on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy, though this event is billions of years in the future.