Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is typical: it has hundreds of billions of stars, enough gas and dust to make billions more stars, and at least ten times as much dark matter as all the stars and gas put together. And it’s all held together by gravity.
Like more than two-thirds of the known galaxies, the Milky Way has a spiral shape. At the center of the spiral, a lot of energy and, occasionally, vivid flares are being generated. Based on the immense gravity that would be required to explain the movement of stars and the energy expelled, the astronomers conclude that the center of the Milky Way is a supermassive black hole.
Other galaxies have elliptical shapes, and a few have unusual shapes like toothpicks or rings. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) shows this diversity. Hubble observed a tiny patch of sky (one-tenth the diameter of the moon) for one million seconds (11.6 days) and found approximately 10,000 galaxies, of all sizes, shapes, and colors. From the ground, we see very little in this spot, which is in the constellation Fornax.
Formation
After the Big Bang, the Universe was composed of radiation and subatomic particles. What happened next is up for debate - did small particles slowly team up and gradually form stars, star clusters, and eventually galaxies? Or did the Universe first organize as immense clumps of matter that later subdivided into galaxies?
Collisions
The shapes of galaxies are influenced by their neighbors, and, often, galaxies collide. The Milky Way is itself on a collision course with our nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. Even though it is the same age as the Milky Way, Hubble observations reveal that the stars in Andromeda's halo are much younger than those in the Milky Way. From this and other evidence, astronomers infer that Andromeda has already smashed into at least one and maybe several other galaxies.
Recent Discoveries
Date Discovery
March 14, 2022 Eye of the Galaxy (NGC 1097)
March 9, 2022 Tilted Galaxy Turns Studies Topsy-Turvy
February 22, 2022 Hubble Looks at a ‘Space Triangle’ Spawned by a Galaxy Collision
February 7, 2022 A Cosmic Draw (Arp 282)
January 24, 2022 Strike! (NGC 7764A)
A galaxy is a gravitationally bound system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter.[1][2] The word is derived from the Greek galaxias (γαλαξίας), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. Galaxies range in size from dwarfs with just a few hundred million (108) stars to giants with one hundred trillion (1014) stars,[3] each orbiting its galaxy's center of mass.
2021, data from NASA's New Horizons space probe was used to revise the previous estimate to roughly 200 billion galaxies (2×1011),[7] which followed a 2016 estimate that there were two trillion (2×1012) or more[8][9] galaxies in the observable universe, overall, and as many as an estimated 1×1024 stars[10][11] (more stars than all the grains of sand on all beaches of the planet Earth).[12] Most of the 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). For comparison, the Milky Way has a diameter of at least 30,000 parsecs (100,000 ly) and is separated from the Andromeda Galaxy (with diameter of about 220,000 ly), its nearest large neighbor, by 780,000 parsecs (2.5 million ly.)
The space between galaxies is filled with a tenuous gas (the intergalactic medium) with an average density of less than one atom per cubic meter. Most galaxies are gravitationally organized into groups, clusters and superclusters. The Milky Way is part of the Local Group, which it dominates along with Andromeda Galaxy. The group is part of the Virgo Supercluster. At the largest scale, these associations are generally arranged into sheets and filaments surrounded by immense voids.[13] Both the Local Group and the Virgo Supercluster are contained in a much larger cosmic structure named Laniakea.
Nice
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