What is beyond the Solar System?

Our little home in the heavens, the Solar System, is about 7,000 million miles from side to side. But in the vast and starry Milky Way it is no more than a small fly in a big football stadium. Outside Pluto, the last planet of the Solar System, is a wide ocean of empty space stretching in all directions. If we traveled in exactly the right direction across this big ocean, after about 26 million, millions miles we would come to a small group of islands.

The ocean islands are stars, somewhat like our sun. We would find three of them, fairly close together. Beyond them is more space. The stars we see in the sky are, all far apart, but together they form a giant system of stars like a whirling pinwheel. This is the Galaxy or Milky Way. Beyond our Big Wheel of stars there are more oceans of space dotted with millions of sister galaxies.