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Galaxy facts

    Galaxies are groups of billions of stars held together by the force of gravity. Most are either spiral or elliptical, but some are irregular in shape.


The Milky Way
  This is the best-known galaxy. The word galaxy comes from the Greek for milk. Before telescopes were powerful enough to prove that they were made up of individual stars, galaxies looked like milky or cloudy areas in the sky. Our Solar System is only one of 100 -200 billion stars in the Milky way, which is 100,000 light years in diameter. The Sun and all the planets take about 200,000,000 years to complete on orbit around its centre.

Brightest
  The Large Magellanic Cloud, which is visible only in the southern hemisphere, is 170,000 light years from Earth and 39,000 light years in diameter.

Largest
  The central galaxy of the Abell 2029 galaxy cluster was discovered in 1990. It is 1,070 million light years  distant and has a diameter of 5.6 million light years, 80 times the diameter of our own galaxy. It has a total light output equivalent to 2 trillion times that of the Sun.

Nearest
  Discovered in 1993, the Canis Major Dwarf galaxy is approximately 25,000 light years from the Solar system.
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