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The Milky Way stretches across the night sky, a luminous band of countless stars, cosmic dust, and distant galaxies. Our home galaxy, a barred spiral spanning over 100,000 light-years, contains hundreds of billions of stars with our solar system nestled in one of its spiral arms. Ancient civilizations saw myths written in its glow, while modern astronomy reveals its true nature—a vast, rotating island of matter held together by gravity and dark matter, continuously reshaping itself through stellar births and deaths.