Largest galaxy in the universe

This Hubble image shows the giant galaxy cluster Abell 3827. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / R. Massey. Typically, they contain thousands of galaxies of all ages, shapes and sizes. They have a mass of about one million billion times the mass of the Sun and form over billions of years as smaller groups of galaxies slowly come together. At one point in time galaxy clusters were believed to be the largest structures in the Universe — until they were usurped in the 1980s by the discovery of superclusters, which typically contain dozens of galaxy clusters and groups and span hundreds of millions of light-years. However, clusters do have one thing to cling on to; superclusters are not held together by gravity, so galaxy clusters still retain the title of the biggest structures in the Universe bound by gravity. “Looking at this cluster of hundreds of galaxies, it is amazing to recall that until less than 100 years ago, many astronomers believed that the Milky Way was the only galaxy in the Universe,” Hubble astronomers said. “The possibility of other galaxies had been debated previously, but the matter was not truly settled until Edwin Hubble confirmed that the Great Andromeda Nebula was in fact far too distant to be part of the Milky Way.” “The Great Andromeda Nebula became the Andromeda Galaxy, and astronomers recognized that our Universe was much, much bigger than humanity had imagined.” “We can only imagine how Edwin Hubble — after whom the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope...

Called JD1, the galaxy — whose light traveled for roughly 13.3 billion years to reach us — was born just a few million years after the Big Bang. Back then, the cosmos was shrouded in a pitch-black fog that not even light could pass through; galaxies like this one were vital in burning the gloom away. Twinkling from within the Sculptor constellation in the southern sky, JD1's light left its source when the universe was just 4% of its current age. The light crossed dissipating gas clouds and boundless space before passing through the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, whose space-time-warping gravitational pull acted as a giant magnifying lens to steer the ancient galaxy into focus for the JWST. The researchers who discovered the dim, distant galaxy published their findings May 17 in the journal Nature. Related: Can the James Webb Space Telescope really see the past? "Before the Webb telescope switched on, just a year ago, we could not even dream of confirming such a faint galaxy," Tommaso Treu, a physics and astronomy professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), said in a statement. "The combination of JWST and the magnifying power of gravitational lensing is a revolution. We are rewriting the book on how galaxies formed and evolved in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang." In the first hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, the expanding universe cooled enough to allow protons to bind with electrons, creating a vast shroud of light-blocking hydrogen...

The universe is a big place, and it's full of big things. Planets, stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies extend upward on ever-more-massive scales. Here we marvel at some of the record holders in different cosmic categories, perhaps feeling humbled by the universe's ability to produce entities of incredible size and grandeur. (Image credit: ESO) Astronomers weren't sure what to make of the mysterious GQ Lupi b when it was first discovered in 2005. Orbiting a young star around two and a half times farther than Pluto is from the sun, the companion object seemed to be either a planet or a brown dwarf, which is actually a type of small star. Subsequent observations have yet to clear up the confusion, but the best estimates suggest GQ Lupi b has a radius around 3.5 times that of Jupiter, meaning that if it is an exoplanet, it's the largest ever found. Largest star: UY Scuti (Image credit: Philip Park/ UY Scuti is a hypergiant star with a radius that's around 1,700 times larger than the sun, making it the biggest known star in the universe. If someone were to place UY Scuti at the center of the solar system, its edge would extend just beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Gas and dust streaming from the star would extend even farther out, beyond the orbit of Pluto, or around 400 times the Earth-sun distance. (Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/PSU/L.Townsley et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI; Infrared: NASA/JPL/PSU/L.Townsley et al.) Both the largest known nebula and most active star-forming reg...

From a pre-existing state, inflation predicts that a series of universes will be spawned as inflation continues, with each one being completely disconnected from every other one, separated by more inflating space. One of these "bubbles," where inflation ended, gave birth to our Universe some 13.8 billion years ago, with a very low entropy density, but without ever violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Key Takeaways • Here on Earth, our entire planet is a little under 13,000 kilometers in diameter, or about seven orders of magnitude greater than the size of a human. • But as we go up, to larger and larger scales, we find that stars, stellar systems, star clusters, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and more show us how insignificant human, and even planetary, scales truly are. • Even with all we know, the vast abyss of the unobservable Universe is larger than the cumulative suite of all we can see. These images show how big the cosmic scale truly is. This image, taken from the International Space Station by astronaut Karen Nyberg in 2013, shows the two largest islands on the southern part of the Mascarene Plateau: Réunion, in the foreground, and Mauritius, partially covered by clouds. To see a human on Earth from the altitude of the ISS, a telescope the size of Hubble would be needed. The scale of a human is less than 1/5,000,000 the scale of Earth, but Earth is just a proverbial drop in the cosmic ocean, with a diameter of only a little over 10,000 kilometers. ( All that h...

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian scientists study many different aspects of galaxy clusters: • Mapping the structure of galaxy clusters using the hot plasma that fills the space between galaxies. Even though this plasma’s density is low, its temperature can reach hundreds of millions of degrees, so it shines brightly in X-ray light. The temperature patterns seen NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory reveal a lot about the inner workings of clusters, such as the way gas flows in and out of galaxies. • Studying how black holes pump energy into the region between galaxies in a cluster, which is known as “feedback”. The feedback process can throttle the formation of new stars inside cluster galaxies, in a complex interaction between the black hole and the hot cluster gas. • Plotting the strange “cold fronts” in the hot gas inside the cluster, which form giant ripples of relatively colder gas. These poorly-understood cold fronts are probably relics of earlier galaxy cluster collisions, and can linger for billions of years. • Using the South Pole Telescope (SPT) and other observatories to measure the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect. These instruments observe galaxy clusters by the fluctuations they create in microwave light from the very early universe. The result is a map of hundreds of galaxy clusters, many of which are too far to be seen directly by the light they emit. A Recipe for Galaxy Clusters Even though “galaxy” is right there in the name, galaxies are the smallest...

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