Part 3/9:
Cosmic Neighborhood: A Close Examination
In the context of mapping our galactic neighborhood, we begin with the Milky Way Galaxy itself, a vast system containing a few hundred billion stars and spanning roughly 100,000 light-years across. Our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, lies a mere four light-years away, while the closest major galaxy, Andromeda, is about 2.5 million light-years away.