Short answers, pulled from the story.
Western culture derives the name Milky Way from its appearance as a dim unresolved milky glowing band arching across the night sky. Geoffrey Chaucer traced the English term back to a specific story that popularized the name among European speakers.
Galileo Galilei used a telescope in 1610 to study the Milky Way and discovered it was composed of huge numbers of faint stars. This observation resolved the galaxy into individual stars rather than a continuous cloud.
Astronomers reported the discovery of one of the oldest stars in the universe on November 2018 named 2MASS J18082002-5104378 B which is 13.5 billion-years-old. This ultra metal-poor UMP star suggests the galaxy is at least 3 billion years older than previously thought.
The Sun is located at a radius of about 27,000 light-years or 8.3 kiloparsecs from the Galactic Center inside the inner edge of the Orion Arm. Studies by Gillessen et al. 2016 confirm the Sun currently sits above the north central plane of the Galactic disk.
The Galactic Center marked by intense radio source Sagittarius A* harbors a massive compact object with an estimated mass between 4.1 and 4.5 million times the Sun's mass. This object best explains the nature of the inactive galactic nucleus observed today.