How big is the Milky Way galaxy?

The Milky Way is approximately 100,000 light-years in diameter and about 1,000 light-years thick at the disk. It contains an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars and likely a similar number of planets. The galaxy has a central bulge roughly 10,000 light-years across, surrounded by spiral arms extending outward. Our solar system sits about 26,000 light-years from the galactic center, in the Orion Arm. The entire galaxy is surrounded by a much larger halo of dark matter that extends several hundred thousand light-years beyond the visible disk, making the true total extent of the Milky Way considerably larger than what we can directly observe.