In this big universe, it’s easy to feel small and insignificant, as if there’s nothing special about our planet, our star, our celestial neighborhood. After all, the sun is just one of hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. What do we have to brag about?
Yet astronomers in the know have long realized that our galaxy is exceptional. By size alone, it’s “in the top percentile of all the galaxies that exist,” says Joss Bland-Hawthorn, an astronomer at the University of Sydney who helped compile the galaxy’s vital statistics for a 2016 article in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He puts the Milky Way’s mass at a hefty 1.0 trillion to 1.6 trillion times that of the sun, outweighing the vast majority of its peers by a factor of 10 to more than a million and greatly outshining them as well.
