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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.
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.
Contains about 56,000 galaxies, located 820 million light years away. BOSS Great Wall (BGW) (2016) 1,000,000,000: Structure consisting of 4 superclusters of galaxies. The mass and volume exceeds the amount of the Sloan Great Wall. [21] Perseus–Pegasus Filament (1985) 1,000,000,000: This galaxy filament contains the Perseus–Pisces Supercluster.
Galaxies are categorised according to their visual morphology as elliptical, [5] spiral, or irregular. [6] The Milky Way is an example of a spiral galaxy. It is estimated that there are between 200 billion [7] (2 × 10 11) to 2 trillion [8] galaxies in the observable universe.
A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). "We see two galaxies, each a collection of billions of stars. The galaxies are in the process of merging.
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. [1]
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 ...
Groups are the most common structures of galaxies in the universe, comprising at least 50% of the galaxies in the local universe. Groups have a mass range between those of the very large elliptical galaxies and clusters of galaxies. [5] Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is contained in the Local Group of more than 54 galaxies. [6]