• Question: Do you know what is beyond our galaxy

    Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 23 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sam Connolly

      Sam Connolly answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Billions of other galaxies! Our galaxy is part of something called the ‘Local Group’, which is a group of galaxies which are quite close together, including the closest galaxy to us, Andromeda, some smaller dwarf galaxies, like the large and small Magellanic Clouds, and a galaxy called the Triangulum galaxy. On really, really big distances, these groups of galaxies group together in connected strings called ‘filaments’, which join together to make a huge web of galaxies throughout the universe. In between them, there’s almost nothing though, just a tiny bit of gas! There’s a video here of what we think the Universe looks like on an intergalactic scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC5pDPY5Nz4

    • Photo: Nate Bastian

      Nate Bastian answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Yes, billions of other galaxies. It wasn’t until about 1920 though, that we understood this, before that there was a long debate about whether our galaxy (The Milky Way) was the only galaxy in the universe. But we now know that there are billions of other galaxies, each made up of billions of stars.

    • Photo: Sarah Casewell

      Sarah Casewell answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Yes – many many other galaxies!

    • Photo: Roberto Trotta

      Roberto Trotta answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      If you look beyond our galaxy with the most powerful telescopes on earth and in space, you will see lots and lots of other galaxies — imagine, 5,000 galaxies would fit in the eye of a needle held at arms’ length!

      But if you look even further back, you will go back to a time when not even galaxies existed. A time when the Universe was so young that galaxies had not formed yet, stars did not exist, nor planets. This is a time when the Universe was filled only with hot gas (that we call “plasma”), light and dark matter. We can actually look all the way back to this time, some 380,000 years after the big bang, and see what this Baby Universe looked like.

      The resulting map of the Universe is here:
      http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2013/03/Planck_CMB
      Pretty amazing, don’t you think?!

    • Photo: Natasha Stephen

      Natasha Stephen answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      Billions of other galaxies with billions of other stars and potentially billions of other planets! It’s pretty big out there! 😀

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