Our solar system is not alone. We are part of an even bigger galaxy. We call this the milky way. It’s a spiral shaped collection of billions of stars, one of which is our sun. The stars you can see in the sky at night, are the stars in the galaxy. There are about 200 billion of them. It may not look like a spiral shaped galaxy, but that’s because we are in it. From our point of view it looks more like a big stripe you can sometimes see in the sky when it’s very clear.
One of those stars is our sun. Right about… here. Revolving around the sun are the planets. Mercury, Venus, our very own Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The other stars in the Milky Way have planets too. That means there are not only many more stars out there, but also many other planets. And on top of that, astronomers say the milky way contains an enormous amount of moons, comets, gas and star dust.
And that’s only our galaxy. Apart from that, there are many other galaxies. The Andromeda galaxy for example. Close to ours, and pretty similar to our own milky way.
