Top-down view of the Milky Way (annotated)

No spacecraft can travel beyond our galaxy, so it is impossible to take pictures of the Milky Way from the outside. Instead, we can rely on accurate measurements made by ESA’s Gaia mission of the positions and motions of many of our galaxy’s stars. Using computers to model Gaia’s data, scientists can construct different views of our cosmic home.

In this image we see the Milky Way as if we were hovering above it. We can admire our galaxy’s grand spiral structure in its stunning beauty and clearly identify the different parts; a central glowing bar with several spiraling arms around it. The Sun sits in the outskirts of the immense spiral, at 26 600 light-years (8200 parsec) from the centre, towards the bottom in this image. Annotations give the names and mark the locations of the spiral arms.