describe the milkey way galaxy?
599588
Well it is a spiral galaxy, but it is a kind of cool one.  It is a little difficult to tell from inside the disk, but it looks like we live in a barred spiral galaxy.  \n\nNot one with a huge bar, like this one: (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050112.html) \n\nbut kind of a medium bar like this one:\n\n(http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap041216.html).\n\nSeen edge on it looks like this far-far-far infrared picture:\nhttp://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap950908.html\n\nThat is real data taken from earth orbit, so you can see why it is hard for us to see if there is a bar. We surmise the bar from the velocity distributions of gas and stars towards the center.\n\nSo that is what it looks like.  In proportion, star wise, you can imagine the central bulge as the size of a hard boiled hens egg yolk, and the disk about the dimensions of a CD. Yeah, VERY thin. there is no edge, the stars just kind of peter out.  Also, the center is mostly old small reddish stars, and the arms are domininated light wise by young blue short lived stars. There is a thicker disk of fainter red old stars too. \nMost of the gas and dust is in the disk and a ring around the bar.  This is where all the star formation goes on. \n\nI could go on for pages more...but that should be enough to get you to ask more focussed questions.
1010133
In a galaxy, far, far away.
895275
I read in Time a few years back that in an article, scientists explained a theory that universes connect as a chain, and our Universe- is among many. The idea was quite something to read and of course the diagrams and images they used to portray this thing out was all very fascinating to say the least. It was a rational idea even to me and considering what we found with a pin tip portion of the night sky magnified 1,300 times....hundreds of thousands of Galaxy's all clustered in an array that almost seemed like you are looking at it all through a cylinder. \nSo there is no real way to know for certain, but there could be millions of them...and a chain of universes makes rational sense.
300780
there are several (you did not provide enough details)...could be a sun, galaxy, nebula, etc.
665147
only a few galaxies have names: the sombrero, the milky way, andromeda, the black eye, the pinwheel, the small and large malgentic clouds, the whirlpool, and the spindle are all i know of.\n\nMost go by NGC #### in the new star catalouges.\n\nand we only have found a few galaxies.  There are still almost unlimited more!
307862
If you look at the sky on a clear night, away from city lights and polluted air, you'll see a milky band of light right across the sky, the Milky Way, our galaxy.   With a small telescope you'll see the milkiness is made of individual stars.You're looking at the plane of ourgalaxy.   If you look away from this band of light you're looking out into intergalactic space away from the thickness of our galaxy so you don't see so many stars.   If you look in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, you'll see the Milky Way seems to get wider and brighter.   This is the centre of the galaxy.   So the galaxy is shaped like two dinner plates facing each other, circular, and fatter at the centre than at the edges.   The centre is bright because stars are packed closer together there than way out here.   We know that we're about 30 000 light years from the centre, the diameter of the galawy is about 100 000 light years and the thickness at the centre is about 3000 light years because a particular type of star called a Cepheid variable gets brighter and dimmer with a period that depends on how bright it is.   So we know how bright it really is.   By measuring how bright it appears, we can work out haw far away it is.   So by looking at Cepheids in different parts of the galaxy we can work out its measurements.   And if we look at other galaxies outside our own, many of them are the same shape; fat in the centre, thin at the edges, with spiral arms curving out from the centre, like cloud bands in a hurricane.
495737
Smartie pants?\nEvidence points to a massive black hole at the center of the galaxy (Milky Way).  The black hole, with a mass more than three million times that of our sun, would appear to be in the constellation of Sagittarius.
362021
We can only give a rough guess as to how many galaxies there are, and it's billions at least. All but the closest ones visible as galaxies to the naked eye have names. Our local galaxy is the Milky Way, which you can see in a dark place on a clear night as a streak of stars running across the sky. A cluster is a group of galaxies.\n\nSome galaxies we have discovered with Hubble and other new telescopes seem to crashing into each other, and the Milky Way may be on its way to having a galactic interloper in the far future.
1056330
red dwarf\ndemons & angels \nholly
986295
The Milky Way (a translation of the Latin Via Lactea, in turn derived from the Greek Γαλαξίας (Galaxias), sometimes referred to simply as "the Galaxy"), is a barred spiral galaxy of the Local Group. Although the Milky Way is but one of billions of galaxies in the universe, the Galaxy has special significance to humanity as it is the home of the Solar System. Democritus (450 BC–370 BC) was the first known person to claim that the Milky Way consists of distant stars.\n\nThe term "milky" originates from the hazy band of white light appearing across the celestial sphere visible from Earth, which is comprised of stars and other material lying within the galactic plane. The galaxy appears brightest in the direction of Sagittarius, towards the galactic center. Relative to the celestial equator, the Milky Way passes as far north as the constellation of Cassiopeia and as far south as the constellation of Crux, indicating the high inclination of Earth's equatorial plane and the plane of the ecliptic relative to the galactic plane.The fact that the Milky Way divides the night sky into two roughly equal hemispheres indicates that the solar system lies close to the galactic plane.\n\nThe main disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is about 80,000 to 100,000 light years in diameter, about 250-300 thousand light years in circumference, and outside the Galactic core, about 1,000 light years in thickness. It is composed of 200 to 400 billion stars [1]. As a guide to the relative physical scale of the Milky Way, if the galaxy were reduced to 130 km (80 mi) in diameter, the solar system would be a mere 2 mm (0.08 in) in width. The Galactic Halo extends out to 250,000 to 400,000 light years in diameter. As detailed in the Structure section below, new discoveries indicate that the disk extends much farther than previously thought.\n\nThe Milky Way's absolute magnitude, which cannot be measured directly, is assumed by astronomical convention to be −20.5, although other authors give an absolute magnitude of -21.3.\n\n\nThe age of the Galaxy is currently estimated to be about 13.6 billion (109) years, which is nearly as old as the Universe itself.[1]\n\nThis estimate is based upon research performed in 2004 by a team of astronomers: Luca Pasquini, Piercarlo Bonifacio, Sofia Randich, Daniele Galli, and Raffaele G. Gratton. The team used the UV-Visual Echelle Spectrograph of the Very Large Telescope to measure, for the first time, the beryllium content of two stars in globular cluster NGC 6397. This allowed them to deduce the elapsed time between the rise of the first generation of stars in the entire Galaxy and the first generation of stars in the cluster, at 200 million to 300 million years. By including the estimated age of the stars in the globular cluster (13.4 ± 0.8 billion years), they estimated the age of the Galaxy at 13.6 ± 0.8 billion years.
475165
Us.  The Milky Way is the name of the galaxy in which we currently reside.  Aside from us, there are a lot of stars and planets and such.  There is a widespread belief that the center of the galaxy contains a black hole.
1086035
This question  has been asked before, hasnt it? Sounds familiar.\n\nSpace is never ending, you can leave the Milky Way and you will enter another galaxy, depending on where ure exit point is.
526016
Humans found out that they live in a small living planet in the middle of a very-small galaxy. our galaxy is in the middle of a small super-cluster too. And they dont know more about this.
1061786
There are actual images of the entire galaxy, but from our position within the disk, it looks a lot like an edge on thin disk with a galactic bulge.  The earliest image of our galaxy that I know of was assembled from IRAS data.  The DIRBE experiment aboard COBE also produces a some nice ones (COBE was a mission to explore the microwave background radiation left over from the big bang.  DIRBE was aboard that spacecraft to characterize the diffuse infrared foreground, namely our galaxy, so its contribution could be removed from the microwave measurements).\n\nDIRBEs shorter wavelength infrared channels trace the stars in the galaxy nicely so you can see the bulge:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap000130.html\n\nThe longer wavelength channels are more sensitive to dust:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap000517.html\n\nNote that these are all sky images probably using a Molleweide projection.  The centers look towards the center of the galaxy, but the edges look directly out (away) from the center.  This is a "wraparound" view.
344610
==\nYes Milky Way is name of our galaxy.\n\nThere are different stories behind the term Milky Way.\n\nThe most authentic and widely accepted story is the fact that Greeks thought that the band of thickly populated stars in the night sky is the path from heavens made up of milk.\n\nSome other believed the band of most stars as the path of angles or gods which has become bright like milk. \n\nThere are also some other stories. One thing common to all them is that the band of stars is a path or way so the name become milky way.
171073
Rephrase your question sweety, the Milky Way & the Galaxy are the same, but there are other galaxies than ours. then... different than what? are you smoking something?
1127711
All the Galaxies:\n\n    * Abell 1835 IR1916\n    * AM 0644-741\n    * Andromeda Galaxy (M31/NGC 224)\n    * Andromeda I\n    * Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038/NGC 4039)\n    * Aquarius Dwarf\n    * Black Eye Galaxy (M64/NGC 4826)\n    * Bode's Galaxy (M81/NGC 3031)\n    * Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy\n    * Carina Dwarf\n    * Centaurus A Galaxy\n    * Cigar Galaxy (M82/NGC 3034)\n    * Circinus Galaxy\n    * Draco Dwarf\n    * Dwingeloo 1\n    * Dwingeloo 2\n    * Fornax Dwarf\n    * Hoag's object (a ring galaxy)\n    * Huchra's Lens\n    * HVC 127-41-330\n    * IC 10\n    * IC 1613\n    * I Zwicky 18\n    * Large Magellanic Cloud\n    * Leo I (dwarf galaxy)\n    * LGS 3\n    * M49\n    * M58\n    * M59\n    * M60\n    * M61\n    * M65\n    * M66\n    * M74 (NGC 628)\n    * M77\n    * M84\n    * M85\n    * M86\n    * M87 (Virgo A Galaxy)\n    * M88\n    * M89\n    * M90\n    * M91\n    * M94\n    * M95\n    * M96\n    * M98\n    * M99\n    * M100 (NGC 4321)\n    * M102\n    * M105\n    * M106\n    * M108\n    * M109\n    * M110 (NGC 205)\n    * M32 (NGC 221)\n    * M61 (NGC 4303)\n    * Maffei I\n    * Maffei II\n    * Milky Way Galaxy - home galaxy of Earth, satellites\n    * NGC 1\n    * NGC 2\n    * NGC 3\n    * NGC 55\n    * NGC 185\n    * NGC 147\n    * NGC 300\n    * NGC 404\n    * NGC 891\n    * NGC 1275\n    * NGC 1569\n    * NGC 1705\n    * NGC 2043\n    * NGC 2403\n    * NGC 3109\n    * NGC 3184\n    * NGC 3226\n    * NGC 3227\n    * NGC 3370\n    * NGC 3384\n    * NGC 3628\n    * NGC 3982\n    * NGC 4395\n    * NGC 4414\n    * NGC 4555\n    * NGC 4565\n    * NGC 4881\n    * NGC 5078\n    * NGC 5195\n    * NGC 6822 (Barnards galaxy)\n    * NGC 7331\n    * NGC 7742\n    * Pegasus Dwarf\n    * Phoenix Dwarf\n    * Pinwheel Galaxy (M101/NGC 5457)\n    * RXJ1242-11\n    * Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy\n    * Sculptor Dwarf\n    * Sextans A\n    * Sextans Dwarf\n    * Small Magellanic Cloud\n    * Sombrero Galaxy (M104)\n    * Southern Pinwheel Galaxy (M83/NGC 5236)\n    * Spindle Galaxy\n          o Spindle Galaxy in Draco (NGC 5866, possibly M102)\n          o Spindle Galaxy in Sextans (NGC 3115)\n    * Spiral Galaxy ESO 269-57\n    * Starfish Galaxy (NGC 6240)\n    * Sunflower Galaxy (M63)\n    * Triangulum Galaxy (M33/NGC 598)\n    * Tucana Dwarf\n    * Ursa Minor Dwarf\n    * VIRGOHI21\n    * Virgo Stellar Stream\n    * Whirlpool Galaxy (M51/NGC 5194)\n    * Willman 1\n    * Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte (WLM)\n    * UGC 5675