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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.
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 ...
5th century BC — Democritus proposes that the bright band in the night sky known as the Milky Way might consist of stars. 4th century BC — Aristotle believes the Milky Way to be caused by "the ignition of the fiery exhalation of some stars which were large, numerous and close together" and that the "ignition takes place in the upper part of the atmosphere, in the region of the world which ...
Galaxies by type. List of spiral galaxies; List of ring galaxies; List of polar-ring galaxies; List of quasars; Galaxies by association. List of largest galaxies; List of nearest galaxies; Satellite galaxies of the Milky Way; Other characteristics. List of galaxies named after people; List of galaxies with richest globular cluster systems
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.
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.
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]