6/22/2023 0 Comments Spiral galaxy facts19, 2018 by Contributor, Elizabeth Howell. Its discovery will help scientists understand how galaxies transition from "highly chaotic, turbulent discs" to more organized and thinner discs, like that of the Milky Way. M104 was discovered in 1781 by the French astronomer and comet hunter Pierre Mchain, one of Charles Messier’s colleagues. In 2017, astronomers discovered an 11-billion-year-old ancient spiral galaxy called A1689B11. M104 is located 28 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, and with a mass equal to 800 billion suns, it is one of the most massive objects in the Virgo galaxy cluster. One of the largest known spiral galaxies is NGC 6872, which is 522,000 light-years across from the tips of its outstretched spiral arms - that's about 5 times the size of the Milky Way. But it's unclear how common elliptical galaxies are as they're made up of older, dimmer stars, and are more challenging to spot. Spiral galaxies are thought to evolve into elliptical galaxies as the spirals get older. M81 is one of the brightest galaxies seen from Earth. Encounters between galaxies could cause such waves as the mass of the smaller galaxy could affect the structure of the larger galaxy as the two combine. Spiral galaxies of the larger variety can spin their arms at an impressive speed of up to 1.25 million miles an hour. Bode’s Galaxy, also known as Messier 81 (M81), is a grand design spiral galaxy located in the constellation Ursa Major. These galaxies are the most common form of galaxies that have been observed, accounting for 70 of the galaxies that have been found. One theory suggests the galaxy arms could be the result of density waves traveling through the outer disk. That spinning motion, at speeds of hundreds of kilometers a second, may cause matter in the disk to take. How the spiral arms form continues to puzzle scientists. A spiral galaxy has a flat, spinning disk with a central bulge surrounded by spiral arms.
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