The Biggest Galaxy in the Universe: How It Compares to the Milky Way

A galaxy is a gravitationally bound system of stars, stellar debris, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter.

Galaxies are classified as elliptical, spiral, or irregular based on their optical form. Supermassive black holes are thought to be present in many of them. Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way's core black hole, has a mass four million times that of the Sun.

In this article we have listed Biggest Galaxy in the Universe and How It Compares to the Milky Way.

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Biggest Galaxy in The Universe

1) IC 1101 - 5.5 million light-years across.

One of the largest known galaxies, IC 1101 is a supergiant elliptical galaxy at the heart of the Abell 2029 galaxy cluster. It has a halo that reaches 600 kiloparsecs (2 million light-years) from its centre and contains 100 trillion stars. Earth is 320 megaparsecs (1.04 billion light-years) away from the galaxy.

2) NGC 4889 - 1,300,000 light-years in diameter

NGC 4889 (also known as Caldwell 35) is an E4 supergiant elliptical galaxy.[4] It was discovered in 1785 by the British astronomer Frederick William Herschel I, who catalogued it as a bright, nebulous patch. The brightest galaxy within the northern Coma Cluster, it is located at a median distance of 94 million parsecs (308 million light years) from Earth.

3) Messier 87 - is 980,000 light-years across.

Messier 87, the Virgo supercluster's largest galaxy, is 980,000 light-years across. The Coma Cluster's biggest, NGC 4889, spans 1,300,000 light-years in diameter. Meanwhile, the Phoenix Cluster's brightest central galaxy measures 2.2 million light-years across.

4) UGC 2885 - 832,000 light-years

UGC 2885, located 232 million light-years away in the northern constellation Perseus. The galaxy is 2.5 times wider than our Milky Way and contains 10 times as many stars.

5) Andromeda - 220,000 light-years

The Andromeda Galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy approximately 2.5 million light-years from Earth and the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way.

6) Milky Way - 100,000 light-years across

The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, The Milky Way is the second-largest galaxy in the Local Group (after the Andromeda Galaxy), with its stellar disk approximately 170,000–200,000 light-years in diameter and, on average, approximately 1,000 ly thick.