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Size (left) and distance (right) of a few well-known galaxies put to scale. There are an estimated 100 billion galaxies in all of the observable universe. [1] On the order of 100,000 galaxies make up the Local Supercluster, and about 51 galaxies are in the Local Group (see list of nearest galaxies for a complete list).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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] Local Hole: 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 ...
This is a list of known galaxies within 3.8 megaparsecs (12.4 million light-years) of the Solar System, in ascending order of heliocentric distance, or the distance to the Sun. This encompasses about 50 major Local Group galaxies, and some that are members of neighboring galaxy groups , the M81 Group and the Centaurus A/M83 Group , and some ...
The image shows a slight rotation in the vertical plane (the lower right moving toward earth, the upper left moving away), showing that M87 is rotating slowly. [51] [52] M87 is one of the most massive galaxies in the local Universe. Its diameter is estimated at 132,000 light-years, which is approximately 51% larger than that of the Milky Way.