The solar system and its planets are part of the Milky_Way, an enormous conglomeration of between 100 to 200 billion stars.
To the naked eye, only about two to three thousand stars are visible. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. To gain an impression of what our galaxy looks like when seen from far away, we must rely on what we can observe of other galaxies.
Because of the great distance of many thousands of light-years to the edge of the Milky Way, we will probably never be able to see it in total. Along with about 30 other galaxies (for instance the Andromeda nebula), it is part of the Local Group. This is the term used to describe our galactic cluster. Individual galactic_clusters are also associated with each other and belong to an immense supercluster.
The largest known structures in space are the honeycomb-like conglomerations of superclusters, which enclose vast empty zones in the spaces between them.
