A galaxy is a huge collection of gas, dust, and billions of stars and their solar systems. A galaxy is held together by gravity. Milky Way is our galaxy.It has a supermassive black hole in the middle.The Milky Way’s nearest neighbour is the Andromeda Galaxy which is about 2.5 million light years (that’s 15 million trillion miles) away. In about 4.5 billion years’ time, the Milky Way is expected to collide with Andromeda.
We live on a planet called Earth that is part of our solar system which is a small part of the Milky Way Galaxy.
When you look up at stars in the night sky, If it’s really dark, far away from lights you can see the dusty bands of the Milky Way stretch across the sky.
There are many galaxies besides ours,of all sizes, shapes, and colors.There could be as many as one hundred billion galaxies in the universe.
Some galaxies are spiral-shaped like ours and it is called Spiral Galaxy.Other galaxies are smooth and oval shaped. They’re called elliptical galaxies.And there are also galaxies that aren’t spirals or ovals. They have irregular shapes and are called Irregular galaxies.
The light that we see from each of these galaxies comes from the stars inside it.
