Current scholarship generally places the formation of the Milky Way between 200 and 600 million years after the Big Bang, during the period of early galaxy formation that followed the forging of Population II stars. Some of the oldest stars within the Milky Way belong to this Population II category, with estimates for their formation dating as early as 200 million years after the Big Bang. This places the Milky Way’s birth in the epoch shortly after the earliest galaxies began to coalesce from the primordial gas. As astronomical techniques advance and provide new data, we may need to refine this timeline to more accurately reflect the chronology of the Milky Way’s formation in relation to the dawn of galaxies across the cosmos.