milky way
Compared to Earth, the solar system is a big place. But galaxies are bigger - a lot bigger. A galaxy is a very large group of stars held together by gravity. How enormous a galaxy is and how many stars it contains are impossible for us to really understand. A galaxy contains up to a few billion stars! Our solar system is in the Milky Way Galaxy. It is so large that if our solar system were the size of your fist, the galaxys disk would be wider than the entire United States! There are several different types of galaxies, and there are billions of galaxies in the universe.