Why does the Milky Way look uneven?

A galaxy is a huge collection of stars, dust, and gas. Galaxies usually consist of up to a trillion stars. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, in different shapes, sizes and brightness. Our planet, Earth, is part of the huge galaxy called the Milky Way. Our Sun and its planets are about half way out from the center. The sun orbits the center of the galaxy.

What is the Milky Way, and why does it appear the way it does? This was a puzzle for many years until Galileo pointed his telescope at this faint band of light and found out that it was composed of stars---in fact millions and millions of individual stars. Each by themselves is too faint to see with the naked eye, but when in the company of millions of other faint stars, merge to produce a faint, continuous band of glowing light. So, by 1610 or so, we finally discovered that the Milky Way is a band of faint stars.

Close inspection of the Milky Way does not have a uniform thickness, and is very patchy. In the wintertime sky, the Milky Way is a thin band of light, and is quite faint. In the Summer, however, the Milky Way is brighter. Note how patchy the Milky Way appears to be, there are dark lanes, or rifts, as well as isolated dark regions. 

The Milky Way is shaped like a huge whirlpool that rotates once every 200 million years. It is made up of at least 100 billion stars, as well as dust and gas. It is so big that light takes 1000 years to cross from one side to the galaxy, the stars are close together, and the galaxy shines brightly. This is why the Milky Way looks patchy.

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