What is the average size of a galaxy?

105,700 light years
Milky Way/Diameter

What’s the average distance between stars in the Milky Way galaxy?

0.013 light-year
This works out to an average of only 0.013 light-year, or 860 astronomical units (1 AU is the average Earth-Sun distance), between stars. Most galaxies, such as M31 in Andromeda, M33 in Triangulum, and the Milky Way have central densities close to this value — an average separation of 0.013 light-year.

What is the average distance in KPC between galactic clusters?

Regardless, the average distance between clusters is estimated as twice the cluster radius D≈2RC=23√34πVC=(20 to 24)Mpc. For reference, the radius of the milky way is 15 to 28kpc and the distance to the Andromeda galaxy is 780kpc.

How is the distance between galaxies measured?

Because space is so big, many astronomers do not like to say how far away things are using miles or kilometers. Instead, we use a measurement that we call a parsec. Remember Alpha Centauri, the closest star? It is 1.347 parsecs, or 41,560,000,000,000 (or 41.56 trillion) kilometers away.

What is the largest galaxy?

IC 1101
It’s difficult to characterize what the largest galaxies are, because they don’t really have precise boundaries, but the largest galaxies we know of are millions of light-years across. The biggest known galaxy is IC 1101, which is 50 times the Milky Way’s size and about 2,000 times more massive.

How many known galaxies are there?

While estimates among different experts vary, an acceptable range is between 100 billion and 200 billion galaxies, said Mario Livio, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

What is average distance between stars?

Although galaxies look like dense concentrations of stars they are really very empty. In the Milky Way, the average distance between stars is about 5 light years, or 30 trillion miles.

How far apart are galaxy clusters?

It is hard to give an exact distance for a supercluster, because the galaxy clusters within it are often millions of light years from each other! The Hydra Supercluster is about 100 million light years long, and the galaxy clusters within it range from about 105 to 160 million light years away from us.

Which is larger a group of galaxies or a galaxy cluster?

Clusters of galaxies Clusters are larger than groups, although there is no sharp dividing line between the two. When observed visually, clusters appear to be collections of galaxies held together by mutual gravitational attraction.

What is the average distance between galaxies?

The simple answer is that the average galaxy spacing is around a few megaparsecs, while the biggest galaxies are around 0.1 megaparsecs in size. So the average spacing is somewhere in the range of 10 – 100 times the size of the biggest galaxies.

What is the closest galaxy to Earth?

The closest dwarf galaxy to us is the Canis Major, located at around 8 kpc distance. The Milky Way has around 25 satellite galaxies and they are located within 420 kpc distance with average distance of 110 kpc. The closest large galaxy next to us is the famous Andromeda Galaxy which is located at approximately 780 kpc away.

How many light years are there between galaxies in a cluster?

How we come to that number: The average distance between galaxies is a few megaparsecs. A megaparsec is 1 million parsecs and there are roughly 3.3 light years to a parsec, so that means there are on average, sticking with threes, we’ll say a few equals 3, 9,900,000 light years between galaxies in a galaxy cluster that is.

How many galaxies are there in the universe?

Assuming (in 2018) we have about two trillion galaxies in an observable universe 46.5 billion light years in radius, we can compute the average volume per galaxy and take the cube root of that volume to obtain a flawed but useful notion of average distance between galaxies: