It's a 1000 LY thick you would have to do this distance 250 times just to go from the top part of the galaxy to the bottom part much less going across the galxy so it might sem relatively flat but it's still immensely immensely thick. and just as another way to visualise it if this thing right over here that includes the Oort cloud roughly a LY in diameter it is a grain of sand a mm in diameter grain of sand then the universe as a whole is gonna be the diameter of a football field and those are two tractable things, i can imagine a grain of sand a mm wide grain of sand in a football field. but remember that's a grain sand that grain of sand is still 50 or 60, 000 times the diameter of the Earth's orbit and it would still take a bullet or something travelling as fast as a jet plane 15 hrs to just go half of that or sorry 15 yrs or 17 yrs I forgot the exact number but you knpw 15, 16 , 17 yrs to even cover half of that distance 30 yrs to cover an entire diamtere, so 30 yrs to cover the entire diameter of earths orbit tahts one 60,000th of our lil grain of sand in the football field and just to kind of really i dunno have an appreciation for how amaz- i dunno how mind blowing this really is , this is a picture of the milky way galaxy, our galaxy from our vantage point as you can see we're in the galaxy so we're seeing and this is looking towards the centre and even this picture you start to appreciate the complexity of what a 100 billion stars are but what i really wanna point out is that even in this pic when yu're looking at some of these things that are like stars those arent stars! those are thousands of stars or millions of stars maybe it could be one star closer up but when we're startin to approach the centre of the galaxy these are thousands and thousands and millions of stars or solar systems that we're actually looking at so its really, it starts to boggle the mind to imagine what might actually be going on over there. 