On a clear, dark night away from city lights, a pale, glowing band stretches right across the sky. I saw it properly for the first time on a camping trip out to Winton, in outback Queensland, the same trip that took me to the Lark Quarry dinosaur tracks. There was no city glow at all. The stars were brighter than I’d ever seen them, and the band ran from one horizon to the other.
That band is the Milky Way, and you’re looking at it from the inside.
So what is the Milky Way? It’s our home galaxy, a vast spinning disc of stars, gas, dust and planets held together by gravity. Most estimates put it at somewhere between 100 billion and 400 billion stars, according to Discover Magazine. Our Sun is just one of them.
How big is the Milky Way, and where are we?
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy. Picture a flat disc with a bulge in the middle, spiral arms curling out from a central bar of stars. It’s about 100,000 light-years across, so light, travelling about 300,000 km every second, still takes around 100,000 years to cross it. According to NASA’s StarChild, the Sun sits about 28,000 light-years from the centre, a bit over halfway out, and takes about 230 million years to complete one orbit.
Think about that for a second. The last time Earth was at this point in its trip around the galaxy, the first dinosaurs were just appearing.
The pale band we see is the galaxy’s disc viewed edge-on from inside. It’s the combined light of billions of stars, too distant and too tightly packed to pick out one by one. The ancient Greeks called it galaxias kyklos, the milky circle, which is where our word “galaxy” comes from. The Romans called it Via Lactea, the milky way. And ours is only one galaxy among a staggering number; astronomers estimate the observable universe holds hundreds of billions of them.
Seeing the Milky Way from Australia
Here’s the good news for us: the Southern Hemisphere has the better view. From Australia, we look straight towards the brightest part of the galaxy, its bulging centre, in the constellations of Sagittarius and Scorpius.
The core is best in our winter, roughly May to August, when it climbs high overhead in the evening. To see it properly:
- Get somewhere truly dark, well away from city lights.
- Check the Moon. It should be down, or just a thin crescent.
- Give your eyes about 20 minutes to adjust, and keep your phone in your pocket.
Southern skies also show off two small galaxies most of the Northern Hemisphere never sees: the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. They look like fuzzy, torn-off pieces of the Milky Way. They’re among our galaxy’s closest neighbours, far closer than the famous Andromeda galaxy.
The Emu in the Sky
Long before telescopes, Aboriginal Australians were reading the Milky Way. Not just its stars, but its dark patches.
Many groups see a great emu stretched along the galaxy, made from clouds of dust and gas. Its head is the dark patch beside the Southern Cross, which astronomers call the Coalsack Nebula. Its neck and body run down through the Milky Way towards the galaxy’s bright centre, as the University of Melbourne’s Pursuit explains.
The emu changes position through the year, and that carried real, practical meaning. For the Euahlayi and Kamilaroi peoples of northern New South Wales, the celestial emu, called Gawarrgay in Euahlayi tradition, is seen in June and July as a male sitting on his nest. That’s exactly when real male emus are sitting on their eggs.
Once someone points out the emu, it’s hard to see the Milky Way any other way.
The black hole at the centre
At the heart of the Milky Way sits a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A*, pronounced “sadge-ay-star”. It’s about four million times the mass of the Sun, and roughly 27,000 light-years away.
On 12 May 2022, astronomers released the first image of it, as the European Southern Observatory announced. It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of radio telescopes around the world working together as one Earth-sized telescope.
You can’t actually see the black hole itself. Nothing escapes it, not even light. What the image shows is a glowing ring of gas, bent by its gravity, around a dark central shadow.
Will the Milky Way crash into Andromeda?
For decades, astronomers said the Milky Way was on a collision course with Andromeda, our nearest large neighbour, in about 4 to 5 billion years. A 2025 study in Nature Astronomy has made that much less certain.
The study was led by Till Sawala of the University of Helsinki and co-written by Ruby Wright of the University of Western Australia. By carefully accounting for measurement uncertainties, and including the pull of nearby galaxies, the team found only about a 50% chance that the two will merge in the next 10 billion years, as the researchers wrote in an article published by the University of Western Australia.
There’s a twist closer to home. The team also found that a merger with the Large Magellanic Cloud, that small galaxy we can see from Australia, is almost certain within the next 2 billion years, according to Sci.News.
Either way, don’t worry about stars smashing together. Galaxies are mostly empty space, so if they do collide, individual stars, including the Sun, are very unlikely to hit each other.
Looking up at home
So that soft band of light on a winter night is our own galaxy, seen from the inside, and Australian skies show it off beautifully. Next time you’re somewhere dark between May and August, look up. Find the Southern Cross, trace the emu’s head along the dust, and follow it into the bright heart of the galaxy.
If you want to know more about the star at the centre of our own small corner, see when will the Sun die?, and for how gravity makes bodies orbit a shared point, see what is a barycentre?
Sources
- Discover Magazine: 10 facts you may not know about the Milky Way
- NASA StarChild: Does the Sun move around the Milky Way?
- University of Melbourne, Pursuit: Coins and constellations
- European Southern Observatory: Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy (2022)
- University of Western Australia: Astronomers thought the Milky Way was doomed to crash into Andromeda (2025)
- Sci.News: Our Milky Way galaxy may escape collision with Andromeda (2025)