Our Milky Way is 100,000 light years across. But there are objects much bigger than her.
So far, the largest known galaxy is called IC 1101, with an approximate diameter of 6 million light years. It is located more than 1 billion light years from Earth. In turn, it is moving away at a speed of 23,000 kilometers per second , due to the expansion of the universe itself.
IC 1101 is an elliptical galaxy that has a particularity: it is a ‘predator’ : it dominates a cluster of thousands of galaxies, the Abell cluster 2029, from which it feeds to grow in size. When two stars collide with each other, the gas and dust quickly coalesce, melting the smaller one into the larger one.
How many stars can this galaxy contain?
As we can see, their number is increasing, but some scientists estimate that it must contain about 1,000 billion stars. Remember that our galaxy has only 100 billion stars.
To get an idea of the immense distances we travel, to reach the closest galaxy to Earth, Andromeda, it would take 2.5 million years traveling at the speed of light. Instead, we would need a billion light years to reach the gigantic IC 1101 galaxy.
Compared to the Milky Way, IC 1101 is so large that it contains 1,400 times as many stars, and several galaxies like ours would fit inside its core.
According to Miguel Gilarte Fernández, president of the Astronomical Association of Spain and director of the Almadén de la Plata Astronomical Observatory, the galaxy IC 1101 seems to have finished its activity: the number of new star births seems to be low, according to observations. Everything indicates that the massive structure would have consumed all the new galaxies around it. But this does not seem to indicate that IC 1101 is going to disappear, due to the intense gravitational force that interacts in it, due to its high mass.
However, all that we perceive of IC 1101 is around 30% of its entire structure, since the remaining percentage exists in the form of dark matter , a type of invisible matter since it does not reflect light. So how do we know it’s there? Due to the gravitational effects it causes on other types of matter that we can detect.
