Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Size (left) and distance (right) of a few well-known galaxies put to scale. The following is a list of notable galaxies.. 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.
The observable universe contains as many as an estimated 2 trillion galaxies [36] [37] [38] and, overall, as many as an estimated 10 24 stars [39] [40] – more stars (and, potentially, Earth-like planets) than all the grains of beach sand on planet Earth. [41] [42] [43] Other estimates are in the hundreds of billions rather than trillions.
A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, dark matter, bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek galaxias, literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System.
Void name/designation Maximum dimension (in light-years) Notes LOWZ North 13788 void: 2,953,000,000: One of largest known voids, containing 109,066 known galaxies. [28] KBC Void: 2,000,000,000: Proposed void containing the Milky Way galaxy and Local Group as an explanation for the discrepancy in the Hubble constant. Existence is still disputed ...
The term "The Local Group" was introduced by Edwin Hubble in Chapter VI of his 1936 book The Realm of the Nebulae. [11] There, he described it as "a typical small group of nebulae which is isolated in the general field" and delineated, by decreasing luminosity, its members to be M31, Milky Way, M33, Large Magellanic Cloud, Small Magellanic Cloud, M32, NGC 205, NGC 6822, NGC 185, IC 1613 and ...
Many dwarf galaxies may orbit a single larger galaxy; the Milky Way has at least a dozen such satellites, with an estimated 300–500 yet to be discovered. [107] Most of the information we have about dwarf galaxies come from observations of the local group, containing two spiral galaxies, the Milky Way and Andromeda, and many dwarf galaxies.
Galaxies range in size from dwarfs with just a few billion (109) stars to giants with one hundred trillion (1014) stars, each orbiting its galaxy's center of mass. Galaxies are categorized according to their visual morphology as elliptical, spiral and irregular. Many galaxies are thought to have black holes at their active centers.
This is a list of largest galaxies known, sorted by order of increasing major axis diameters. The unit of measurement used is the light-year (approximately 9.46 × 10 12 kilometers). Overview