Galaxy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the astronomical structure. For other uses, see Galaxy (disambiguation).
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A galaxy is a gravitationally bound system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter.[1][2] The word galaxy is derived from the Greek galaxias (γαλαξίας), literally "milky", a reference to theMilky Way. Galaxies range in size from dwarfs with just a few thousand (103) stars to giants with one hundred trillion (1014) stars,[3] each orbiting their galaxy's own center of mass. Galaxies are categorized according to their visual morphology, including elliptical,[4] spiral, and irregular.[5] Many galaxies are thought to have black holes at their active centers. The Milky Way's central black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, has a mass four million times greater than our own Sun.[6] As of July 2015, EGSY8p7 is the oldest and most distant galaxy with a light travel distance of 13.2 billion light-years from Earth, and observed as it existed 570 million years after the Big Bang. Previously, as of May 2015, EGS-zs8-1 was the most distant known galaxy, estimated to have a light travel distance of 13.1 billion light-years away and to have 15% of the mass of the Milky Way.[7][8][9][10]
Approximately 170 billion (1.7 × 1011) to 200 billion (2.0 × 1011) galaxies exist in the observable universe.[11] Most of the galaxies are 1,000 to 100,000 parsecs in diameter and usually separated by distances on the order of millions of parsecs (or megaparsecs). The space between galaxies is filled with a tenuous gas with an average density less than one atom per cubic meter. The majority of galaxies are gravitationally organized into associations known as galaxy groups, clusters, and superclusters. At the largest scale, these associations are generally arranged into sheets and filaments that are surrounded by immensevoids.[12]
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