Do you think of the Milky Way as a starry band across a dark night sky? Or do you think of it as a great spiral galaxy in space? Both are correct. Both refer to our home galaxy, our local island in the vast ocean of the universe, composed of hundreds of billions of stars, one of which is our sun.
Long ago, it was possible for everybody in the world to see a dark, star-strewn sky when they looked heavenward at night, rather than the obscuring glow of city lights. In those ancient times, humans looked to the starry sky and saw a ghostly band of light arcing across the heavens, from horizon to horizon. This graceful arc of light moved across the sky with the seasons. The most casual sky-watchers could notice that parts of the band are obscured by darkness, which we now know to be vast clouds of dust.
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Myths and legends grew up in different cultures around this mysterious apparition in the heavens. Each culture explained this band of light in the sky according to its own beliefs. To the ancient Armenians, it was straw strewn across the sky by the god Vahagn. In eastern Asia, it was the Silvery River of Heaven. The Finns and Estonians saw it as the Pathway of the Birds. Meanwhile, because western culture had become dominated by the legends and myths of first the ancient Greeks and then the Romans, it was their interpretations which were passed down to a majority of languages. Both the Greeks and the Romans saw the starry band as a river of milk. The Greek myth said it was milk from the breast of the goddess Hera, divine wife of Zeus. The Romans saw the river of light as milk from their goddess Ops.
Thus it was bequeathed the name by which, today, we know that ghostly arc stretching across the sky: the Milky Way.