One such estimate says that there are between 100 and 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Other astronomers have tried to estimate the number of 'missed' galaxies in previous studies and come up with a total number of 2 trillion galaxies in the universe.
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.
We live in one of the arms of a large spiral galaxy called the Milky Way. The Sun and its planets (including Earth) lie in this quiet part of the galaxy, about half way out from the centre. 100 000 years to cross from one side to the other.
As of today, two trillion galaxies should exist within our observable Universe.
Of the estimated 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, only one in 10 can support complex life like that on Earth, a pair of astrophysicists argues. Everywhere else, stellar explosions known as gamma ray bursts would regularly wipe out any life forms more elaborate than microbes.
Assuming that dark energy continues to make the universe expand at an accelerating rate, in about 150 billion years all galaxies outside the Local Supercluster will pass behind the cosmological horizon.
The trite answer is that both space and time were created at the big bang about 14 billion years ago, so there is nothing beyond the universe. However, much of the universe exists beyond the observable universe, which is maybe about 90 billion light years across.
Live Fast, Die Young
Why these galaxies stopped forming stars so early is still a puzzle. These dead galaxies appear to remain dead even after 11 billion years, in the present-day universe.
Galaxy clusters grow over time under gravity and presently can contain hundreds or even thousands of galaxies, as well as hot gas and dark matter. As time goes by, their galaxies burn through the fuel available and evolve from vigorously star-forming galaxies into red and dead galaxies.
Someday our little corner of the universe will have a ringside seat for one of the biggest events in the cosmos. Two billion years from now, the Milky Way and Andromeda, our closest neighboring galaxy, will begin to fuse into one giant football-shaped galaxy.
Our Sun is one of at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, a spiral galaxy about 100,000 light-years across.
The Sun is one among hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and most of those stars have their own planets, known as exoplanets. The Milky Way is but one of billions of galaxies in the observable universe — all of them, including our own, are thought to have supermassive black holes at their centers.
Because space isn't curved they will never meet or drift away from each other. A flat universe could be infinite: imagine a 2D piece of paper that stretches out forever. But it could also be finite: imagine taking a piece of paper, making a cylinder and joining the ends to make a torus (doughnut) shape.
The Andromeda Galaxy is the only other (besides the Milky Way) spiral galaxy we can see with the naked eye.
At present, travelling to another galaxy is not possible. However, advances in technology and further research and development may someday make interstellar travel a reality. Even then, travelling between galaxies is not an easy task; the distances are immense, so travel would take an extremely long time.
This brings us to the main point of this article – IC 1101. Located almost a billion light-years away, IC 1101 is the single largest galaxy that has ever been found in the observable universe. Just how large is it?
We already know that when galaxies fall into a galaxy cluster, they can be robbed of their gas. When gas is removed, this shuts down star formation, effectively killing a galaxy and turning into a so-called red and dead object.
NASA's James Webb telescope has found six big galaxies that are changing our understanding of the entire universe. The new observations indicate the presence of mature and large, but compact galaxies swarming with stars way sooner than scientists thought was possible.
When all of the stars in a galaxy die, and new ones are no longer forming, the galaxy itself ceases to exist. This occurs when all of the galaxy's gas is ejected, making it impossible for new stars to form.
Firstly, it is a future collision with another galaxy, Andromeda. The galaxies will pass through each other, merge into one gigantic galaxy and all star clouds will flash into a star formation. But there are also some issues, for instance, hot large blue stars, a blasting gas, a quasar, radiation.
Four billion years from now, our galaxy, the Milky Way, will collide with our large spiraled neighbor, Andromeda.
Galaxies seem to be able to "perish" – that is, stop turning gas into new stars – via two very different pathways, driven by very different processes. Galaxies like the Milky Way and Andromeda do so very, very slowly over billions of years.
The world as we know it has three dimensions of space—length, width and depth—and one dimension of time. But there's the mind-bending possibility that many more dimensions exist out there. According to string theory, one of the leading physics model of the last half century, the universe operates with 10 dimensions.
Our universe began with an explosion of space itself - the Big Bang. Starting from extremely high density and temperature, space expanded, the universe cooled, and the simplest elements formed. Gravity gradually drew matter together to form the first stars and the first galaxies.
Thanks to dark energy and the accelerated expansion of the Universe, it's physically impossible to even reach all the way to the edge of today's observable Universe; we can only get a third of the way there at maximum.