The Milky Way is just one neighborhood in a cosmic web

Space · Published 29 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Our galaxy is a massive spiral of stars, but it is far from alone. It lives in a local neighborhood with dozens of neighbors, all part of a sprawling structure of matter that defines the shape of our entire universe.

Gravity binds together enormous structures called galaxies, which are made up of dust, gas clouds, planets, and stars. They vary wildly in scale: the largest can span more than a million light-years and house trillions of stars, while the smallest may contain only a few thousand stars across a few hundred light-years. Most large galaxies feature supermassive black holes at their cores, some reaching masses billions of times that of our Sun.

Our home, the Milky Way, is a spiral galaxy with a stellar disk spanning over 100,000 light-years. From Earth, we see it as a faint band of light because we are looking at its central disk from an edge-on perspective. Our solar system is currently orbiting the galactic center, a journey that takes approximately 240 million years to complete.

The Milky Way is not isolated; it resides in the Local Group, a neighborhood of over 50 galaxies ranging from small dwarf galaxies to the massive Andromeda galaxy. Located on the periphery of the Virgo cluster, this collection belongs to the Laniakea supercluster. On a larger scale, galaxies organize into groups, clusters, and superclusters, forming a 'cosmic web' of matter interspersed with empty voids and walls.

The universe originated approximately 13.8 billion years ago; while many galaxies date back 10 billion to 13.6 billion years, the earliest known one appeared merely 500 million years ago.

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