What is at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy?
921105
A Supermassive black hole about a million times larger than our sun.
511079
GALACTIC TIME references Earth's movement relative to the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Galactic time consists of the GALACTIC DAY--one revolution of Earth around the Sun relative to the galactic center--and the GALACTIC YEAR--time for Earth to make on revolution of the galactic center.
1028391
Our galaxy is the Milky Way.\n\nThe story I heard spoke of a Greek god who was carrying cans of milk to Mt. Olympus when he tripped and spilled the milk across the sky.  The milk became the band of stars we see splashed across the night sky.
440062
The universe contains approximately  200,000,000,000,000,000,000 (200 BILLION BILLION) stars in galaxies scattered throughout the universe.  Our solar system is located in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy.  The Milky Way galaxy contains approx. 200,000,000,000 stars.  \n\nThe universe is the largest of the three organizational structures in your question.  \n\nHope this helps!
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.
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.
421754
We're located in a tiny remnant of a spiral arm called the 'Orion Arm', between two larger arms.  We're located in the main disk, about 25,000 light years out from the core.  This puts us about half way between the core and the edge of the galaxy.  I put an artist's conception below.
67361
At least 100 billion galaxies are known to exist in the Universe. Our galaxy is a spiral one, so in terms of structure it consists of galactic core and several spiral arms. In terms of composition it includes stars, planets (made from regular matter, including atoms of all naturally occurring elements and ions), galactic gas and dust (made from regular matter, mostly hydrogen and helium as far as the gas goes, and hydrogen, carbon, silicon, oxygen and some other elements as far as the dust goes), dark matter and dark energy (there is little known about the last two).
1016970
Plate tectonics?  The sun running out of hydrogen?  You people are nuts.  There is a freaking BLACK HOLE at the center of our galaxy!  Who is going to save us?  Who will stand up and protect the next generation from this threat, a threat that will not only crush us and stretch us out over millions of light years, but convert all our precious bodily fluids into pure energy!  It's a fate unthinkable, all of our precious carbon, poof!  Doesn't anyone care?
22208
The Milky Way is the galaxy we live in. Our Solar System is inside some constelation within the galaxy. A Galaxy has millions of stars and Solar Systems.\n\nThe sun is far from being the origin of the Big Bang. It's just a REALLY REALLY small part of it.\n\nOh, Milky Way is also a chocolate bar.
820102
Well, we know that the galaxy is rotating, if for no other reason than by analogy with other galaxies we see in the universe which we can see rotating.  Moreover, we more or less know the basic shape of the galaxy, which is a rotating disk of stars with a central ball shaped bulge of stars (which also rotates, but the important thing here is the disk).  Additionally we can infer from observations that whatever the center of the galaxy is, we're not it.  :)\n\nUsing the doppler shifts of light, we can tell how fast other stars or clouds of dust in the galaxy are moving with respect to us (but only in the sense that this would be the speed if the star/dust was moving directly towards or away from us).  So, you measure the speed of things around the disk of the galaxy, and there will be four directions in which the speed you measure will be zero.  The final thing we do is look to see which direction has more "stuff".  The direction with more stars and dust (and the central bulge too) is the one which is the center of the galaxy.\n\nNow, if you're wondering why you just wouldn't look for the central bulge or the direction with more stars and dust, well, this will give you the general direction of the galactic center, but it's not very precise.  It's the astronomical equivalent of saying, "It's over that-away".  To get something more precise and exact, you need to do something else, which could be what I was saying above.  Above you would get four pretty precise and exact directions separated by 90 degrees on the sky, and all that's left is to tell which one is towards the center of the galaxy, which is when you fall back on the obvious method as the way to pick between the four more precise answers.  Basically, if you had a big compass engraved on a stone on the ground without any directions marked, having someone tell you that "North is that-away" gesturing in some direction will tell you which of the directions on the compass is north.\n\nOne interesting thing to note is that today our telescopes have improved to the point where we can take pictures of the center of the galaxy and see stars moving around it very quickly.  If we didn't know where the center of the galaxy was and had those pictures we could make a pretty good guess and say that that's where the center of the galaxy is.
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.
763882
A galaxy is a swirling collection of stars. our own Milky Way galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, of which our sun is only one amongst these billions and billions.\n\nA solar system is just a single sun that has planets revolving around it. A galaxy is made up of billions of such suns. And some scientists believe that as many as 25% of the stars could have planets. That means billions and billions of solar systems in our own galaxy.\n\nHere'a a picture of our closest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. It has close to one-trillion stars.\n\nHope this heolps. Cheers\n\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Galaxy
482052
the universe is a giant monkey.  We are just a part of a galaxy which is a little blood cell inside the monkey.
1022362
Off course scienists investigate this. Our galaxy is pretty flat around where we are - only 3,000 light years wide. It gets thicker then that in the center -16,000 light years but that's still pretty thin compare to it's length - about 100,000 light years across. "above" and "below" us are other stars, possibly with other planets. Basically the same things that are "in front" and "behind" us across the length of the galactic disk. \nOn a very dark night you'll be able to see a bright band across the night sky - that's the Milky Way. You'll then be looking towards the galactic center. The pictures we recive from satelites and telescope come from different directions.\nAs for a 3D model of the universe there is such a project in progress but it deals with objects on a much larger scale - galaxy clusters, superclusters, walls and fillaments.
271893
Damn, mosi... I thought it was rich, chocolate nougat.\n\nOh, that's in the center of a Milky Way bar. \n\nNevermind...
777198
the Milky Way is a galaxy