Educational poster about the Milky Way galaxy for children, highlighting its structure, size, and location in the universe.

Let’s solve this step by step.

We are given a table titled “The Milky Way in numbers” with 5 facts and their corresponding distances or sizes. We need to match each fact (numbered 1–5) with the correct distance/size from the list on the right (A–E).

Here’s what we know:

Fact 1: Distance to the center of the Milky Way → should be a large number, since the center is far away.
Fact 2: Diameter of the Milky Way disk → even larger than distance to center? Actually, no — the diameter is across the whole galaxy, so it should be bigger than the distance to the center (which is from Earth to center).
Fact 3: Thickness of the Milky Way disk at the Sun’s position → much smaller, because the disk is flat.
Fact 4: Distance to the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) → very small compared to galactic scales.
Fact 5: Distance to the Andromeda galaxy → huge! It’s another galaxy, so farther than anything else here.

Now let’s look at the options:

A. 26,000 light-years
B. 100,000 light-years
C. 1,000 light-years
D. 4.2 light-years
E. 2.5 million light-years

Step-by-step matching:

→ Fact 4: Nearest star = Proxima Centauri → we know this is about 4.2 light-years → matches D.

→ Fact 3: Thickness of disk at Sun’s position → the Milky Way disk is thin where we are — about 1,000 light-years thick → matches C.

→ Fact 1: Distance to center of Milky Way → astronomers say it’s about 26,000–28,000 light-years → matches A.

→ Fact 2: Diameter of Milky Way disk → about 100,000 light-years across → matches B.

→ Fact 5: Distance to Andromeda galaxy → it’s our closest big neighbor galaxy — about 2.5 million light-years away → matches E.

So the matches are:

1 → A
2 → B
3 → C
4 → D
5 → E

Final Answer:
1-A, 2-B, 3-C, 4-D, 5-E