Cool Fun Facts About Galaxies! 🌌

Interesting Facts About Galaxies!

• A galaxy is a huge collection of black holes, stars, brown dwarfs, planets (and their moons), nebulae, interstellar dust and even an unknown amount of the mysterious dark energy & dark matter!
• All objects in a galaxy are gravitationally bound to one another and are believed (in the case of spiral galaxies) to orbit at least one enormous supermassive black hole at the galaxies centre.
• Until the early 1920’s it was thought that the Milky Way Galaxy was the entire universe before it was revealed it was only one of many galaxies!
• It is now estimated that there are 200 billion galaxies in the universe, which means there are more galaxies than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth!
• All but three galaxies outside of our Milky Way Galaxy (Andromeda and the Large & Small Magnetic Clouds) are too faint to see with the naked eye.
• Galaxies are not randomly distributed throughout the universe but are gravitationally bound into groups, clusters and superclusters.
• Our Milky Way Galaxy is a member of what is known as the ‘Local Group’.
• Galaxies range in size from ‘dwarf’ galaxies with only a few million stars to 'giants' with as many as 100 trillion stars!
• The stars you see in the night sky are all located within our nearby region of the Milky Way Galaxy.
• The dark patches in the Milky Way are actually enormous clouds of gas (hydrogen & helium) and dust which obstruct distant starlight. These star-forming nebulae are common in the spiral arms of other galaxies too, not just the Milky Way.
• Earth, our home planet, is just one planet that orbits the Sun which is one of an estimated 200-400 billion stars which exist in the Milky Way Galaxy!
• The closest galaxy to the Milky Way is the Andromeda Galaxy which scientist say we will merge within about 5 billion years time!
• When galaxies collide, the objects within them are often so distant from one another, that there is a very small chance of a collision or close interactions. However, mergers often result in new stars being formed and the galaxy taking on a new shape!