The Milky Way The Sun belongs to a galaxy, the Milky Way, a collection of about 300 billion stars. The galaxies are the cities of the Universe, with huge populations of stars. In the Visible Universe there are approximately 100 billion of these cities. Among them there are great deserts of space without visible matter. Although they have so many stars, and are therefore very bright, galaxies are generally so far apart that, with rare exceptions, they are only observable through telescopes and preferably in places without light pollution.