THE BIGGEST KNOWN GALAXY

 

The biggest known galaxy is IC 1101, which is 50 times the Milky Way's size and about 2,000 times more massive.

It is about 5.5 million light-years across.

IC 1101 is a supergiant elliptical galaxy at the center of the Abell 2029 galaxy cluster.

Its halo extends about 600 kiloparsecs from its core, and it has a mass of about 100 trillion stars.

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The galaxy is located 1.04 billion light-years from Earth.

The galaxy's morphological type is debated due to it possibly being shaped like a flat disc but only visible from Earth at its broadest dimensions.

Like most large galaxies, IC 1101 is populated by a number of metal-rich stars, some of which are seven billion years older than the Sun, making it appear golden yellow in color.

In fact, 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.

If our galaxy were to be replaced with this super-giant, it would swallow up both Magellanic clouds, the Andromeda galaxy, the Triangulum galaxy, and almost all the space in between.

That is simply staggering.

Over billions of years, galaxies the size of our own have collided and combined to form this immense structure.

Telescopic observations have also revealed an interesting fact about the stars within this galaxy.

Normally, blue-tinted galaxies signal active star formation, while yellow-red hues indicate a cease in the birth of new stars.

IC 1101 is giving birth to very few new stars.

Unless it continues to collide and join with other younger galaxies, IC 1101 will eventually fade away.