Many of the stars you see when you look up in our sky at night are stars in our 'Milky Way'. 

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Our ‘Milky Way’ can appear like a disc on edge as though looking at a dinner plate on edge, this is where you see a cluster of stars appearing like a slim elliptical shape.

 

Although ‘Voyager 1 & 2 have since left our solar system, no human or earth object has ever left our galaxy to see it from afar but best estimates are as below:

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1 Light year = distance a beam of light travels in an earth year (365days)

1 Light year = 5.88 trillion miles.

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So, if our 'Milky Way is 100,000 light years across (as stated above) then this would take 100,000 earth years at light speed of 186,000 miles per second to get from one side to the other.

To help assist the mind to compare distances with how long it would take to travel by car, plane or rocket see page 'How Far Is It & How Long Does it Take', click the yellow link above in the title.

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NASA’s ‘Large Area Telescope’ science team member David Thompson of NASA Goddard, reports from Nasa’s news web site….. "It’s not easy to understand something when you’re in the middle of it."

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It is suggested that there are 10 times more stars in the night sky than grains of sand in the whole world! - Who worked that out! - Science writer David Blatner, in his book 'Spectrums', says a group of researchers at the University of Hawaii,

calculated it.