The Milky Way refers to a bright milky white band across the starry sky. The Milky Way intersects the celestial equator in the constellation Aquila, in the northern hemisphere.


The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy where the solar system is located, including 100 billion to 400 billion stars and a large number of star clusters, nebulae, and various types of interstellar gas and interstellar dust. From the earth, the Milky Way appears as a silver-white ring around the sky.


The Milky Way is an oblate spheroid with a large disk consisting of a bright, dense core, two main spiral arms, and two unformed spiral arms. At the center of the Milky Way is a supermassive black hole, which is composed of a galactic center, a galactic core, a galactic disk, a galactic halo, and a galactic corona from the inside out. The central region of the Milky Way is mostly old stars, and the outer regions are mostly young and young stars. There are more than a dozen satellite galaxies in the surrounding area of hundreds of thousands of light-years, the larger of which are the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud. The Milky Way grows by slowly swallowing the surrounding dwarf galaxies.


So, what is the difference between the solar system and the Milky Way that we often mention? The solar system is a system of celestial bodies bound together by the sun's gravity, located about 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way and 23,000 light-years from the edge. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years in diameter and contains 150 billion stars, and the sun is just one of them. The Milky Way contains the Solar System, and the total mass of the Milky Way is about 210 billion times that of the Sun.


Specifically, the solar system is the collection of the sun at the center and all celestial bodies bound by the sun's gravitational force. Including eight planets, at least 173 known moons and hundreds of millions of small solar system objects.


Broadly speaking, the realm of the solar system includes the sun, the four inner planets like Earth, the asteroid belt made up of many small rocks, the four giant gas-filled stars and the small frozen rocks known as the first part of the Kuiper belt. Two small celestial bodies. There are currently eight planets in the solar system, namely Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.