Which galaxy does our sun belong to?

Answer

The Milky Way is a galaxy, a spiral galaxy, containing about a hundred billion stars and the Sun is one of them. The Sun is in one of the spiral arms. As important as the Sun may be to us, there is nothing special about it in the Milky Way. It’s a very ordinary, rather small star, about five billion years old, with another five billion years or so ahead of us. Imagine that the Sun is a basketball (diameter 30 cm), then the Earth is a sphere of 3 mm at a distance of 25 meters. The outer planet Neptune on that scale is 750m from the Sun and… the nearest star is another basketball at 7000 km, so halfway through Africa. The Milky Way is actually that empty.

We can’t photograph the Milky Way because we are part of it ourselves, but if you want to know what the Milky Way looks like, you can google the keyword “Andromeda Nebula”. That is a close neighbor of the Milky Way.

The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) are the two main (read: largest) members of the “Local Group”. The Magellanic Clouds and galaxy M33 are also part of the Local Group, along with several dozen small dwarf galaxies. Just google one on the “Local Group”, also to see what it belongs to.