Galaxies

📖 In short

A galaxy is a huge group of stars, gas and dust held together by gravity. There are billions of galaxies in the universe! We live in a galaxy called the Milky Way, home to our Sun and hundreds of billions of other stars.

🤩 Did you know?

Galaxies range from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of light-years across.
Scientists have photographed galaxies more than 13 billion light-years away.
People in the southern hemisphere can see two small galaxies called the Magellanic Clouds.
The light we see today from faraway galaxies left them billions of years ago.

🔎 Find out more

🌟 Galaxy shapes

Some galaxies are spirals with curling arms like a whirlpool, like ours. Some are oval like a rugby ball, and some are irregular with no set shape.

🔍 Enormous distances

Galaxies are so big and far away that we measure them in light-years, the distance light travels in a whole year, about 9.5 trillion kilometers!

💡 Our neighbor Andromeda

The nearest big galaxy is Andromeda, which can be seen with the naked eye on very dark nights as a small fuzzy patch. The Muslim astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi described it more than a thousand years ago.

🎯 The universe is growing

Faraway galaxies are moving away from us, and the further they are, the faster they go. From this scientists learned that the universe is expanding and growing.