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Galaxies, averaging an estimated 100 million stars, [3] range in size from dwarfs with less than a thousand stars, [4] to the largest galaxies known – supergiants with one hundred trillion stars, each orbiting its galaxy's centre of mass. Most of the mass in a typical galaxy is in the form of dark matter, with only a few per cent of that mass ...
The largest galaxies are called elliptical because they look like big globes of light emitted from a multitude of stars. The most famous elliptical galaxy is M87, which has up to 2.4 trillion stars.
This unique spiral galaxy, which is situated 3.2 billion light-years from the Earth, has an extended stream of bright blue knots and diffuse wisps of young stars. [2] It rushes at 3.6 million km/h (1000km/s [2]) through the cluster Abell 2667 and therefore, like a comet, shows a tail, with a length of 600,000 light-years.
Examples of astronomical objects include planetary systems, star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies, while asteroids, moons, planets, and stars are astronomical bodies. A comet may be identified as both a body and an object: It is a body when referring to the frozen nucleus of ice and dust, and an object when describing the entire comet with its ...
The Baby Boom Galaxy is a starburst galaxy located about 12.477 billion light years away (co-moving distance is 25.08 billion light years). [1] [4] Discovered by NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, the galaxy is the record holder for the brightest starburst galaxy in the very distant universe, with brightness being a measure of its extreme star-formation ...
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).
NASA has captured what it looks like when two galaxies collide. The image is of Arp 299, about 140 million light years away from Earth, and has been merging for millions of years.
This is in contrast to extragalactic astronomy, which is the study of everything outside our galaxy, including all other galaxies. Galactic astronomy should not be confused with galaxy formation and evolution , which is the general study of galaxies , their formation, structure, components, dynamics, interactions, and the range of forms they take.