Is the Milkyway a Solar system or a galaxy? What are Andromeda and the local group?


Question:
Exactly what is the differance between a solar system and a galaxy? Isn't a galaxy a collection of stars? If so is it known how many galaxies there are? Are they countable?

Answer:
The Milky Way is a galaxy, originally thought to be a spiral and now thought to be of barred spiral structure. It is composed of somewhere between 200 and 400 billion stars orbiting around a well-defined center bulge.

A star system, such as our Solar system, is a group of planets and other bodies orbiting around a star, or a binary or trinary star.

The Andromeda galaxy (M31) is the largest galaxy in our Local Group, which is a not particularly stable grouping of galaxies numbering around 30.
The Milkyway and Andromeda are galaxies and there are estimates over 100 billion galaxies in our universe, each vary between millions to trillions of star systems.

Solar Systems and Galaxies are same in the sense that they each are a system that revolves around one main gravitational source. The difference is the gravitational source and the sheer amount of matter in the system. Galaxies rotate around a super massive black hole. Solar Systems rotate around a star or stars.
Good God, do you not know this basic stuff?

A galaxy is a collection of stars orbitting a central massive area believed to be composed of a super-sized black hole. The number of stars in a galaxy varies, but, for instance, the estimate on the Milky Way galaxy is between two hundred billion and three hundred billion stars.

A solar system has a central star mass and planets orbitting it.

You really need to do some independent research on your own. Google your topics. Don't ask us to write you a book on the subject.
The Milky Way is "our galaxy" of which the Solar System is a part of. Our Solar System consists of the sun, planets, moons (orbiting the planets), comets, asteroids and other objects that orbit the sun. The Milky is like a city of stars and the Solar System is on the outer suburbs of that "star city". Andromeda and the local group are a group of galaxies of which our Milky Way galaxy is a part of. It is not known how many galaxies there are because as telescopes and imaging improve so more and more galaxies are being discovered.
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