7 jaw-dropping images of Milky Way Galaxy captured by NASA

The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy, about 100,000 light-years across, containing roughly 200 billion stars, and our solar system is located about 26,000 light-years from its center. 

It takes about 250 million years for our solar system to orbit the galaxy once. 

At the center of the Milky Way is a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A*, which has a mass about 4 million times that of our sun. 

The name "Milky Way" comes from the ancient Greeks who saw the galaxy as a "river of milk" in the night sky. 

While often described as a flat disk, the Milky Way is actually warped and twisted, with the stars farther from the center becoming more warped and twisted in an S-like appearance. 

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are two of the Milky Way's neighboring galaxies, and their gravitational pull warps the shape of our galaxy. 

The Milky Way is a huge collection of stars, dust and gas. It's called a spiral galaxy because if you could view it from the top or bottom.

Credit: NASA