what is the most biggest galaxy That size is equivalent to to say approximate it is equivalent to the 100Billion milkyways in mass ?
Answers
Answer:
Largest galaxy: IC 1101
Our Milky Way galaxy is around 100,000 light-years across, but that's fairly average for a spiral galaxy. In comparison, the largest known galaxy, called IC 1101, is 50 times larger and about 2,000 times more massive than our galactic home.
Explanation:
The Milky Way is the galaxy in which the Earth resides. Part of it is visible on a clear night from Earth, as a thick band of stars stretching across the sky. We can see thousands of these stars with the naked eye, and many more in a telescope. But how many stars are in the Milky Way?
"It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. You can't just sit around and count stars, generally, in a galaxy," said David Kornreich, an assistant professor at Ithaca College in New York. He was the founder of the "Ask An Astronomer" service at Cornell University.
Even in the Andromeda Galaxy — which is bright, large and relatively close by Earth, at 2.3 million light-years away — only the largest stars and a few variable stars (notably Cepheid variables) are bright enough to shine in telescopes from that distance. A sun-size star would be too difficult for us to see. So astronomers estimate, using some of the techniques below.
The Milky Way's structure
From observations, astronomers know that the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy that is about 100,000 light-years across. A view outside the galaxy would reveal a central bulge surrounded by four arms, two major and two minor. The Milky Way's major arms are known as Perseus and Sagittarius. The sun is located in one of two minor spurs, which is called the Orion Arm.
The galaxy also has a huge hot-gas halo around it that is several hundreds of thousands of light-years in diameter. Astronomers estimate that the halo is just as massive as all of the stars in the Milky Way. Many of the Milky Way's stars, however, are tough to view. That is because the center of the galaxy has a galactic bulge filled with stars, gas and dust — as well as a supermassive black hole. This area is so thick with material that even powerful telescopes cannot see through it. Astronomers aren't sure when and how the bulge formed; some suggest that the Milky Way's early history was changed when the galaxy collided with another one.
Astronomers used to think that all of the stars in the universe were located inside of the Milky Way, but that changed in the 1920s. Astronomer Edwin Hubble used a star called a Cepheid variable to measure distances in the sky. From there, astronomers learned that there were whole galaxies in the universe separate from the Milky Way.
Massive investigation
The primary way astronomers estimate stars in a galaxy is by determining the galaxy's mass. The mass is estimated by looking at how the galaxy rotates, as well as its spectrum using spectroscopy.
All galaxies are moving away from each other, and their light is shifted to the red end of the spectrum because this stretches out the light's wavelengths. This is called "redshift." In a rotating galaxy, however, there will be a portion that is more "blueshifted" because that portion is slightly moving toward Earth. Astronomers must also know what the inclination or orientation of the galaxy is before making an estimate, which is sometimes simply an "educated guess," Kornreich said.
A technique called "long-slit spectroscopy" is best for performing this type of work. Here, an elongated object such as a galaxy is viewed through an elongated slit, and the light is refracted using a device such as a prism. This breaks out the colors of the stars into the colors of the rainbow.
Some of those colors will be missing, displaying the same "patterns" of missing portions as certain elements of the periodic table. This lets astronomers figure out what elements are in the stars. Each type of star has a unique chemical fingerprint that would show up in telescopes. (This is the basis of the OBAFGKM sequence astronomers use to distinguish between types of stars.)
Any kind of telescope can do this sort of spectroscopy work. Kornreich often uses the 200-inch telescope at the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology, but he added that almost any telescope of sufficient size would be adequate.
The ideal would be using a telescope in orbit because scattering occurs in Earth's atmosphere from light pollution and also from natural events — even something as simple as a sunset. The Hubble Space Telescope is one observatory known for this sort of work, Kornreich added. A successor observatory called the James Webb Space Telescope is expected to launch in 2020. The challenge, however, is that Hubble is a telescope in high demand – and the same is expected of Webb after its launch. So the observatories can't spend all of their time estimating galaxy mass.