The components of the Milky Way

We've already briefly discussed what the major constituents of the MW are: stars, gas and dust. Now we'll describe how they're distributed. We think the MW is a pretty much ordinary spiral galaxy, of which we know several million others, but we know this one in a bit more detail. Even so, bare in mind that some of the details are uncertain. The three components are the disk (there is a thin and a thick disk), bulge and halo.