A galaxy, a whopping 160 times the size of the Milky Way galaxy, has been found and tagged as the largest galaxy ever discovered. Researchers at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands have found the largest galaxy ever discovered by humans. The title before this discovery was held by the galaxy IC 1101, which spanned across 3.9 million light-years. The galaxy, which is named Alcyoneus, after the son of the primordial Greek god of the sky, Ouranos, is four times the size of IC 1101 and spans across 16.3 million light-years.
The Alcyoneus galaxy also fosters a supermassive black hole at the centre. This black hole sucks an enormous amount of matter before spitting out gigantic jets of plasma, close to the speed of light. These plasmas helped detect the galaxy as they subdue after travelling millions of light-years and convert into plumes of radio waves. The plumes detected from the radio galaxy are by far the largest ever discovered, and the monstrous size of Alcyoneus has, since being discovered, flabbergasted scientists and left them with a bunch of questions. One of the few theories devised by researchers is centred around the galaxy being surrounded by a low-density environment, which resulted in its plasma jets expanding unprecedentedly.
“If there exist host galaxy characteristics that are an important cause for giant radio galaxy growth, then the hosts of the largest giant radio galaxies are likely to possess them,” explained Martjin Oei, the lead astronomer in their preprint paper, which will be published in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Roughly 3 billion light-years away from Earth and almost 240 billion times the size of our sun, the Alcyoneus galaxy was discovered using the Europe-based LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) and the data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite observatory. Scientists expect to gain more insights into the formation of galaxies by comparing the data with the formation of the largest galaxy ever discovered.
Read all the Latest Buzz News and Breaking News here