Scientists have discovered the largest galaxy ever known, and the new discovery is located regarding 3 billion light-years away. The galaxy, called Alciones, is a giant radio galaxy, and the length of the galaxy is regarding 16.3 million light-years, and for comparison, our galaxy is less than 106,000 light-years, This makes Alciones 153.77 times longer than our Milky Way.
Discover the largest radio galaxy ever
Giant radio galaxies such as Alsionis are another mystery still to be solved. This massive galaxy, and many like it, contain a host galaxy, as well as massive jets and lobes erupting from the galactic center. Scientists believe these jets and lobes are a byproduct of a supermassive black hole. Active in the galactic center, and as such, these massive galaxies are some of the most interesting we’ve discovered in space.
Despite the size of Alsionis, the type of radio lobes they emit is very normal, in fact, our galaxy contains its own set of radio lobes, but the most mysterious thing regarding galaxies like Alsionis is how they grow so large, and given that Alsionis is the largest known galaxy we have discovered Yet, it continues to highlight how little we know regarding the celestial world around us.
Increasing our understanding of radio galaxies:
A team of researchers has prepared a paper dedicated to this issue, and the researchers will publish the paper in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics soon. In the research, astronomer Martin Ue says, Alsiones can help us better understand radio galaxies as a whole.
“If properties of host galaxies are an important reason for the growth of giant radio galaxies, it is likely that larger hosts in giant radio galaxies will have them,” Uwe says in a preliminary edition of the paper.
The research team was looking for outliers in data collected by the Low Frequency Array (LOVAR) in Europe when they discovered the largest galaxy known to date. The result, the researchers say, is the most sensitive search they’ve ever assembled on radio lobes of galaxies, and it’s also how they found the alliones.
After the initial discovery, the researchers continued to process the data surrounding the Alcyonis galaxy, as an attempt to better understand the host galaxy and how radio galaxies become like this, and other information that was identified during the study includes the galaxy’s mass, and according to the study, the largest known galaxy is surrounded by a cosmic network with a mass of more than 240 A billion times the mass of the sun, and in addition, they believe that the supermassive black hole in the center has a mass of 400 million times the mass of the sun.
However, finding the largest known galaxy in the universe only put more questions on the table: How do these galaxies form? Are there bigger galaxies out there? And how much will Alsiones grow in the coming years?
Source: BGR
