Once thought to be its own, unique class of object, the Milky Way is today known to be simply a collection of hundreds of billions of stars, viewed from our vantage point within the galactic plane.
In the early 1600s, Galileo became the first to resolve much of the Milky Way into individual stars, not yet knowing that it was also full of dust, nebulae, and star-forming regions as well. Thanks to amazing projects such as ESO’s Gigagalaxy Zoom, we can view the entire galactic plane at once, at resolutions unimaginable centuries ago.