The Milky Way galaxy is roughly 100,000 light‑years across and about 1,000 light‑years thick in the disk, though its faint outer regions may extend much farther.

Quick Scoop: Core Facts

  • Diameter of main disk: about 100,000 light‑years (some studies suggest the very faint outskirts could reach close to 200,000 light‑years, but 100,000 is the commonly quoted size).
  • Thickness of the stellar disk: roughly 1,000 light‑years near the Sun’s region, thicker toward the central bulge.
  • Number of stars: on the order of 100–400 billion stars.
  • Shape: a barred spiral galaxy (a flat rotating disk with spiral arms and a straight “bar” of stars across the center).

Putting that size in perspective

  • Light travels about 9.5 trillion kilometers in one year, so crossing the Milky Way’s main disk would mean traveling for 100,000 years at light‑speed.
  • If our Solar System were shrunk to the size of a coin, the Milky Way would be like a disk spanning thousands of kilometers in comparison, showing how tiny our local neighborhood really is.

Latest discussion and “new size” ideas

  • Most professional references and educational sites still quote “about 100,000 light‑years” as the standard size for the Milky Way’s disk.
  • Some researchers and forum discussions highlight work suggesting the stellar or gas disk might have very faint extensions that push the effective diameter closer to ~200,000 light‑years, but this involves low‑density outer regions and is less certain than the inner 100,000‑light‑year disk.

Mini forum‑style takeaway

“So, how big is the Milky Way galaxy?”
Think: a flat, starry city about 100,000 light‑years wide, a thousand light‑years thick, holding hundreds of billions of stars – with a ghostly, much fainter ‘suburb’ that might stretch even farther out.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.