A spectacular new photo has been released showing the record-holder for largest galaxy in the universe. NGC 6872, also known as the Condor Galaxy, stretches 522,000 light years from tip to tip.
The biggest single entity that scientists have identified in the universe is a supercluster of galaxies called the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. It's so wide that light takes about 10 billion years to move across the entire structure.
Bottom line: The Local Group of galaxies consists of three large galaxies – the Andromeda Galaxy (biggest), our Milky Way (2nd-biggest) and the Triangulum Galaxy (3rd biggest) – along with 50 or so much-smaller dwarf galaxies.
But the Andromeda galaxy is a whole separate galaxy, even bigger than our Milky Way. In a dark sky, you can see that it's big on the sky as well, a smudge of distant light larger than a full moon. View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Randy Shetter in California, captured this photo of Andromeda on August 7, 2021.
But the size is right—IC 1101 gargantuan. At an estimated 5.5 million light-years wide, over 50 Milky Ways could fit across it! And considering it takes our Solar System about 225 million years to complete a single revolution around the Milky Way… well…
The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is well in the northern part of the sky and many people think that you can not see it from Australia. In fact it can be seen fairly easily from anywhere on the mainland; the further north the better.
Located almost a billion light-years away, IC 1101 is the single largest galaxy that has ever been found in the observable universe. Just how large is it? At its largest point, this galaxy extends about 2 million light-years from its core, and it has a mass of about 100 trillion stars.
One such estimate says that there are between 100 and 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Other astronomers have tried to estimate the number of 'missed' galaxies in previous studies and come up with a total number of 2 trillion galaxies in the universe.
Because space isn't curved they will never meet or drift away from each other. A flat universe could be infinite: imagine a 2D piece of paper that stretches out forever. But it could also be finite: imagine taking a piece of paper, making a cylinder and joining the ends to make a torus (doughnut) shape.
The trite answer is that both space and time were created at the big bang about 14 billion years ago, so there is nothing beyond the universe. However, much of the universe exists beyond the observable universe, which is maybe about 90 billion light years across.
How can a star be older than the universe?
It is estimated that there are roughly 200 billion galaxies (2×1011) in the observable universe. Most galaxies are 1,000 to 100,000 parsecs in diameter (approximately 3,000 to 300,000 light years) and are separated by distances on the order of millions of parsecs (or megaparsecs).
Intergalactic distances are roughly a hundred-thousandfold (five orders of magnitude) greater than their interstellar counterparts. The technology required to travel between galaxies is far beyond humanity's present capabilities, and currently only the subject of speculation, hypothesis, and science fiction.
The light that travels the longest gets stretched by the greatest amount, and the object that emitted that light is now at a greater distance because the universe is expanding. We can see objects up to 46.1 billion light-years away precisely because of the expanding universe.
Compared to other types of galaxies, elliptical galaxies have smaller portions of gas and dust, contain older stars, and don't form many new stars. The largest and rarest of these galaxies – known as giant ellipticals – are about 300,000 light-years across.
The term dark matter was coined in 1933 by Fritz Zwicky of the California Institute of Technology to describe the unseen matter that must dominate one feature of the universe—the Coma Galaxy Cluster.
There are about 51 galaxies in the Local Group (see list of nearest galaxies for a complete list), on the order of 100,000 in the Local Supercluster, and an estimated 100 billion in all of the observable universe.
Milky Way Galaxy | AMNH. The Milky Way is the galaxy in which our Solar System lives. There are more than 200 billion stars in our spiral galaxy, and our Sun is just one of them.
The answer is an absolutely astounding number. There are approximately 200 billion trillion stars in the universe. Or, to put it another way, 200 sextillion. That's 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000!
Scientists estimate that red dwarfs make up to 85 percent of the stars in our Galaxy. These stars are about one-fifth as massive as the Sun and up to 50 times fainter.
As part of the constellation Canis Major the Greater Dog, Sirius also earns the nickname of the Dog Star. From the Northern Hemisphere, Sirius arcs across in the southern sky. From the Southern Hemisphere, it swings high overhead.
Southern hemisphere night skies like those in Australia have a whole bunch of galactic and intergalactic objects that you simply can't see from the northern hemisphere of the world. Looking high in the northern sky from the UK there's a large circle of circumpolar stars that you'll always see.
For Australia, fall is the only time the Big Dipper can be seen. In the states, it can be seen all year round. Notice the North Star cannot be seen from Australia – AT ALL!
We currently have no evidence that multiverses exists, and everything we can see suggests there is just one universe — our own.