Question: What's so important about the milky way?

Liza Sazonova answered on 10 Nov 2020:

It’s a galaxy we live in, so really it’s the most important galaxy in the Universe 🙂
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You can look up in the sky and see the Milky Way if you’re somewhere really really dark. It looks like a fuzzy white patch on the sky, a bit faint, unlike the stars you normally see. But every little bit of white you see at night when you look at the Milky Way is actually thousands of stars like our Sun! It’s very very cool: we live in a huge galaxy made from 1.5 trillion stars like our own.
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But there are other galaxies, some are bigger and some are smaller. We can see some of them from a really dark place too: Andromeda in the northern hemisphere, and Small & Large Magellanic Clouds in the southern hemisphere.
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There are billions of other galaxies. We can see and study them with telescopes. This is what my job is! 🙂
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For example, the Hubble Space Telescope took this amazing picture of the “Hubble Ultra-Deep Field”: some of the furthest away galaxies from us. Every bright spot on this picture (except a couple spiky ones) is a galaxy. It’s amazing how many other galaxies there are, you even forget that each of them has billions of stars like ours. https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0611b/
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So in a sense you are right, Milky Way is not that special after all, except that it’s our home base 🙂