What is the diameter of galaxies?

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).

What is the distance between two galaxies?

The average distance between galaxies is about one million light years. There are roughly 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Another, often-used unit of distance is the parsec. One parsec is approximately 3.26 light-years.

What are the relative sizes of galaxies?

We live in the Milky Way Galaxy, a disk-shaped galaxy roughly a hundred thousand light-years across and two thousand light-years thick. The smallest dwarf galaxies are a few percent of that size. The largest galaxies, found at the centers of galaxy clusters, are more than ten times larger than the Milky Way.

What is the diameter of Andromeda galaxy?

220,000 light years
Andromeda Galaxy/Diameter

The Andromeda Galaxy has a diameter of about 220,000 ly (67 kpc), making it the largest member of the Local Group in terms of extension. The number of stars contained in the Andromeda Galaxy is estimated at one trillion (1×1012), or roughly twice the number estimated for the Milky Way.

What is the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy in miles?

NASA estimates the galaxy at 100,000 light-years across. Since one light year is about 9.5 x 1012km, so the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy is about 9.5 x 1017 km in diameter.

Are galaxies close together or far apart?

Compared to stars, galaxies are relatively close to one another. They interact and even collide. When galaxies collide, they pass through each other; their stars don’t crash into each other because of the immense distances between them.

What is the shortest distance between two galaxies?

The closest to the Milky Way is the Canis Major Dwarf irregular galaxy (disputed) at a distance of ~25,000 light years from the solar system, followed by Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy (not disputed) at about 70,000 light years.

How wide is Milky Way galaxy?

2 million light-years
Our galaxy is a whole lot bigger than it looks. New work finds that the Milky Way stretches nearly 2 million light-years across, more than 15 times wider than its luminous spiral disk.

How far is Earth from galactic center?

25,800 light-years
The new map suggests that the center of the Milky Way, and the black hole which sits there, is located 25,800 light-years from Earth. This is closer than the official value of 27,700 light-years adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1985.

What is the diameter of biggest galaxy?

Some estimates suggests that IC 1101 is 6 million light-years in diameter. To give you some idea of what that means, the Milky Way is just 100,000 light-years in diameter.

What is the largest galaxy in the universe?

The largest yet known galaxy in the universe is IC 1101. It’s located about a billion light-years away from earth and it’s estimated that it is 6 million light-years in diameter.

What is bigger than a galaxy?

Some galaxies are bigger than others, but bigger than any single galaxy are galaxy groups, and larger than those are galaxy clusters. Below you can see the progression of things, from a single galaxy to whole regions of the universe. Our Milky Way is part of a group of galaxies called the Local Group, which consists of more than 54 galaxies.

How big are galaxies?

Normal Galaxies. Galaxies are huge collections of stars, dust and gas. They usually contain several million to over a trillion stars and can range in size from a few thousand to several hundred thousand light years across.

Is there anything bigger than the universe?

The usual definition of the universe is “everything that exists”. So “something bigger than the universe” is an oxymoron: something bigger than the biggest.