Researchers at Leiden University in The Netherlands are attributing a “stroke of luck” for helping discover the largest galaxy on record. A team led by university PhD student Martijn Oei managed to discover a radio galaxy at least 16 million lightyears long, or roughly 100 Milky Way galaxies lined up one after another.
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“The picture of the two plasma plumes is special, because never before scientists saw a structure this big made by a single galaxy. The discovery shows that the sphere of influence of some galaxies reaches far from their direct environment. How far, exactly? That is hard to determine,” a statement released by the research reads.
It adds, “Astronomical pictures are taken from a single viewpoint (Earth), and therefore do not contain depth.As a result, scientists can only measure a part of the radio galaxy length: a low estimate of the total length. But even that lower bound, of more than 16 million lightyears, is gargantuan, and comparable to one hundred Milky Ways in a row”
The newfound galaxy, named Alcyoneus after the Greek giant often found opposite of the Olympian Pantheon, is located around three billion light-years from Earth. For the record, it would take upwards of 35,000 calendar years to travel a single light-year, even using the speediest technology on the planet.
“As far as we know at this moment, the remarkable thing about this galaxy is that it is actually so unremarkable in all aspects we’ve checked until now,” Oei told Newsweek. “Its outflows are larger than any we’ve seen before but we don’t know yet why!”
At the center of Alcyoneus rests a supermassive black hole, which has created two jet streams that catapult cosmic material out across the cosmos at a rate that rivals the speed of light.
As of now, researchers aren’t sure what allowed Alcyoneus to grow as massive as it is. One working theory posits the amount of stardust being distributed by the aforementioned jet streams, though that can’t be confirmed.
The study has been accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics, which you can see here.
Cover photo by Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images
