Awesome Amazing Facts: 45 Awesome Facts About Galaxies

45 Awesome Facts About Galaxies(Interestingawesome.blogspot.com)

There are tons of amazing things exist in the space. Galaxies are one of them. Studying about galaxies is a very interesting and exciting thing. Generally galaxy is a gravitationally bound system of stars, stellar remnants , interstellar gas , dust , and dark matter .The word galaxy is derived from the Greek galaxias (γαλαξίας), literally "milky", a reference to the Milky Way . Galaxies range in size from dwarfs with just a few billion (10⁹ ) stars to giants with one hundred trillion (10¹⁴ ) stars, each orbiting its galaxy's center of mass . This is getting very interesting, isn’t it? Without going further, here are some mind blowing facts about galaxies.

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Galaxies are categorized according to their visual morphology as elliptical ,spiral and irregular .
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 the Sun .
These interstellar objects that are smaller than galaxies have been named dwarf galaxies that have several billion stars and there are even smaller objects called hobbit galaxies.
As of March 2016, GN-z11 is the oldest and most distant observed galaxy with a comoving distance of 32 billion light-years from Earth, and observed as it existed just 400 million years after the Big Bang.
Previously, as of July 2015, EGSY8p7 was the most distant known galaxy, estimated to have a light travel distance of 13.2 billion light-years away.
Approximately 170 billion (1.7 × 10¹¹ ) to 200 billion (2.0 × 10 ¹¹ ) galaxies exist in the observable universe .
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 having an average density of less than one atom per cubic meter.
The dense molecular clouds of hydrogen gas and dust in the spiral arms of spiral galaxies.
If you gaze out into the night sky with a telescope, and see beyond what’s visible to the naked eye, you could see a lot of “stars” that are actually not stars but galaxies.
The Hubble classification scheme, lists spiral galaxies as type S, with an 'a', 'b', or 'c' depending on how tight the spiral arms are and the size of the center bulge. Barred spiral galaxies have the symbol SB.
Actual proof of the Milky Way consisting of many stars came in 1610 when the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study the Milky Way and discovered that it is composed of a huge number of faint stars.
The largest galaxies are giant ellipticals. Many elliptical galaxies are believed to form due to the interaction of galaxies , resulting in a collision and merger. They can grow to enormous sizes,and giant elliptical galaxies are often found near the core of large galaxy clusters.
Many dwarf galaxies may orbit a single larger galaxy; the Milky Way has at least a dozen such satellites, with an estimated 300–500 yet to be discovered.
Any galaxy that has no obvious spiral or elliptical structure are called irregular galaxies. Some irregular galaxies would have just formed that way while others are the result of other galaxy types crashing into each other.
Our Milky Way Galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy about 120,000 light-years in diameter containing up too 400 billion stars and possibly just as many planets.
Our Milky Way Galaxy is part of a 'Local Group' of galaxies in which the galaxies move relative to each other. The Andromeda Galaxy is the largest galaxy of the Local Group, followed by the Milky Way and the Triangulum Galaxy, there are around 30 other smaller galaxies in the group.
Starburst is a name for galaxies that form a lot of new stars at a fast rate, usually after much molecular cloud is produced as two galaxies merge.
Galaxies often collide with each other. Usually, the stars within each will move past one and other due to the vast space between them. Any gas clouds and dust will interact, forming new stars. Gravity can pull the galaxies into new shapes, two spiral galaxies might join into a new elliptical, others produce bars, rings, or tails.
A study of 27 Milky Way neighbors found that in all dwarf galaxies, the central mass is approximately 10 million solar masses , regardless of whether the galaxy has thousands or millions of stars. This has led to the suggestion that galaxies are largely formed by dark matter , and that the minimum size may indicate a form of warm dark matter incapable of gravitational coalescence on a smaller scale.
Spiral galaxies are rotating flattened disk-shapes with at least two spiral arms of newer stars extending out from a central bulge of older stars.
The Andromeda Galaxy is not the closest galaxy to ours, and in fact there is one 100 times closer called Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy that is 42,000 light years far from the galactic center and it is a satellite dwarf of the Milky Way.
Elliptical galaxies often appear to have one bright star in the middle but it is actually a collection of stars.
Elliptical galaxies contain some of the oldest stars because they do not have the ability to form new stars.
Our Solar System is located within the disk of the Milky Way Galaxy, around 27,000 light-years from the Galactic Center of the galaxy.
When a person sees the Milky Way at night, they are seeing only about 0.0000025% of the galaxy’s hundreds of billions of stars.
It would take a phenomenal amount of energy for a star or other object to leave the galaxy. Stars must reach speeds 1 million mph faster than the 600,000 mph at which objects already speed around the Milky Way. Astronomers have discovered 18 such giant blue stars being ejected out of our galaxy. Scientists are unsure how the stars are being propelled.
If our solar system were the size of a U.S. quarter, the sun would be a microscopic piece of dust and the Milky Way would be about the size of the United States.
The Milky Way rotates at a speed of 168 miles per second. So, the actual place in space where you were an hour ago is now roughly 600,000 miles away.
The Milky Way has a halo of dark matter that makes up over 90% of its mass. What this means is that all we can see, even with telescopes, is less than 10% of the mass of our galaxy.
It would take a spaceship thousands of years traveling at the speed of light to get far enough to capture a picture of the entire galaxy. Every picture of the Milky Way that we have is either a picture of another galaxy or an artists interpretation. So till today, there is no photographs that contain entire milky way galaxy.
Right now, the Milky Way and another spiral galaxy called Andromeda are moving toward each other. They are approaching each other at about 75 miles (120 kilometers) per second.
However, the sun and Earth may not be greatly affected because the distance between stars in the galaxies is so large. But then earth will be a dead planet too hot to be inhabited. When the collision is over, the Milky Way and Andromeda will no longer be two spiral galaxies, but one elliptical galaxy.
Our Sun completes an orbit of the Milky Way galaxy about once every 225million years.
There are about 24 galaxies in the observable universe for every single person alive on earth.
Supernovae explode on an average once every 100 years in a galaxy. Assuming there are 170 billion galaxies in the universe, there are 53 supernovae exploding every single second.
The last time a star went supernova in our milky way galaxy was documented in 1604 and we are overdue for another one.
The Milky Way is what’s known as a barred spiral galaxy , it’s shaped like a spiral with a straight bar across its center.
Even though we don’t feel it , Our entire local group of galaxies is moving at about one million miles per hour toward another galaxy group called the Virgo Cluster. The Milky Way can be seen to be just a small part of a large grouping of galaxies 150 million light years in diameter called the Virgo Super cluster.
Amazing fact is we’re actually travelling at about 828,000 kilometers (515,000 miles) per hour relative to the center of the Milky Way. That speed would take you around the Earth in just over three minutes.
The Earth and our solar system are currently travelling through in an area with just 5% of the average density of the Milky Way Galaxy. It was probably blasted clear by a supernova 300,000 years ago.
Each time the Sun makes it all the way around the Milky Way, it’s known as the galactic year, or cosmic year. It’s estimated that there have been only 18 cosmic years in the history of the Solar system.
Andromeda (M31) is just one of the 10 galaxies which is barely visible being the most distant object visible with naked eye in the universe at the constellation of Andromeda. If it were brighter, it would appear six times larger than the full moon.
One of the galaxy has been named “Death Star Galaxy” because it is shooting an energetic blast of energy from its super massive black hole at its companion galaxy and thereby destroying it.
South African and Swedish scientists discovered that dung beetles navigate using the Milky Way for orientation. They are the first animals proven to use our galaxy for navigation.
Our solar system may smell like hot metal and seared steak, but what about the middle of the Milky Way? According to recent research from the Max Plank Institute , it smells like raspberries and tastes like rum.