I would lie on sick leave under haloperidol.==
I really don't recommend this crap. The body kills in such a way that it is difficult to fix anything later.

But in this world I find a lot of disappointments, people are busy with some senseless crap, as if everyone was born as unreasonable slaves ==
Write a test letter to [email protected]. I’ll give you a link, read it, maybe you’ll understand why it’s like this... I’m tired of writing in the comments already

What did it turn into? ==
As a tool for isolating people unwanted by society. There is no one there now. In addition to idiots and other things, there are also drunks, drug addicts, and so on. The doctors there don’t give a damn about you, they’ll prescribe chemo and then don’t care what’s wrong with you, as long as you don’t obviously throw your skates away (corpses in the hospital spoil the reporting and therefore they try not to let it come to that). They can’t cure you, if only because not a single psychiatrist really knows what crazy is, and it’s unlikely that even one of them has tried cheating in their own skin. They have no idea and almost no experience, how will they treat it then? From books? So each person has his own version of crazy, but you’re tired of describing it in books. And they don’t need it, they mostly just stupidly make money and don’t really worry about it.

But then we would not see either red or blue shifts ==
they do not affect the speed of movement of the photon, only the frequency of oscillations changes.

We would have to be clever about the curvature of space ==
Well, physicists are wise. For them, a black hole is possible only because space is so strongly “curved” near the event horizon that light has no way to escape from the trap. And I have never heard from physicists that photons are attracted due to gravitational interaction.

The fact that the photon speed is an absolute constant is an error ==
I read somewhere from physicists that if the speed of light were noticeably different from what it is now, then the material world would not exist. That is, the same anthropic principle

Perhaps you already know how ==
Everyone has it, but not everyone knows how to use it. Do you want to find the answer to the question yourself? Just think about it, on this topic. Let go of control over your thoughts and let them flow freely. When the question is formed, you will understand immediately that it is like a feeling, a feeling. The answer comes almost instantly, also like a feeling. Then it can take years to translate this into letters. It’s similar to how you struggle with something for a long time, it doesn’t work out, and then bam and insight turns into understanding. That short moment, before insight, is the answer and it comes as a sensation of the body. It takes practice to catch, nothing works the first time.

Theory is fortune telling ==
It would be more accurate to say interpretation. When you translate knowledge-without-words into letters, this is also an interpretation. What I do is also an interpretation. That is, there are distortions anyway. I could probably put everything I said into equations, but I don’t yet speak mathematics at the proper level, and in the mathematics that exists there are enough “features” that do not allow me to do this. However, mathematical abstraction is the only way to express this knowledge with minimal distortion.

And now they’ve already put a lot of things on air ==
We live in a time when the information space has turned into a garbage dump and a hellish mixture of truth and lies. And the lies are only coming, because many have learned to make money by filling the world with evil. As a result, we will come to the point that everything will need to be multiplied by zero and started from the beginning.

Ether became obsolete and was replaced by STO and OTO. Einstein gave birth to both ==
Einstein is like the reincarnation of Aristotle or even perhaps Susanin. The fact that he led science into the wilds, I really need to say thanks to him for that. Because now we have martyrs running around with ten kilograms of TNT in their belts, but it would be with ten Hiroshimas
equivalent at least. Progress in this area would solve all our energy problems, but as usual, first we would make weapons tens of times more powerful and hundreds of times more compact and would have torn the planet to shreds long ago. Tesla, too, they say, got to the bottom of it and then burned all the manuscripts, I roughly understand what direction he got into and why he did this. Likewise, if I finish chewing the matan and so on and deduce everything with formulas and equations, most likely I’ll give it to whoever. People have not yet grown up to this, first the social system and people's brains must change, and only then will they be able to open these doors, behind which there is an ocean of fire and an abyss of energy...

The universe is huge and fascinating. It is difficult to imagine how small the Earth is compared to the cosmic abyss. Astronomers' best guess is that there are 100 billion galaxies, and the Milky Way is just one of them. As for Earth, there are 17 billion similar planets in the Milky Way alone... and that's not counting others that are radically different from our planet. And among the galaxies that have become known to scientists today, there are very unusual ones.

1. Messier 82

Messier 82 or simply M82 is a galaxy five times brighter than the Milky Way. This is due to the very rapid birth of young stars in it - they appear 10 times more often than in our galaxy. The red plumes emanating from the center of the galaxy are flaming hydrogen that is being ejected from the center of M82.

2. Sunflower Galaxy

Formally known as Messier 63, this galaxy has been nicknamed the Sunflower because it looks like it came straight out of a Vincent Van Gogh painting. Its bright, sinuous "petals" are composed of newly formed blue-white giant stars.

3. MACS J0717

MACS J0717 is one of the strangest galaxies known to scientists. Technically, this is not a single stellar object, but a cluster of galaxies - MACS J0717 was formed by the collision of four other galaxies. Moreover, the collision process has been going on for more than 13 million years.

4. Messier 74

If Santa Claus had a favorite galaxy, it would clearly be Messier 74. Astronomers often think about it during the Christmas holidays, because the galaxy is very similar to the Advent wreath.

5. Galaxy Baby Boom

Located approximately 12.2 billion light years from Earth, the Baby Boom Galaxy was discovered in 2008. It got its nickname due to the fact that new stars are born in it incredibly quickly - approximately every 2 hours. For example, in the Milky Way, a new star appears on average every 36 days.

6. Milky Way

Our Milky Way Galaxy (which contains the Solar System and, by extension, the Earth) is truly one of the most remarkable galaxies known to scientists in the Universe. It contains at least 100 billion planets and about 200-400 billion stars, some of which are among the oldest in the known universe.

7. IDCS 1426

Thanks to the IDCS 1426 galaxy cluster, today we can see what the Universe was like two-thirds younger than it is now. IDCS 1426 is the most massive galaxy cluster in the early Universe, having a mass of about 500 trillion Suns. The galaxy's bright blue core of gas is the result of the collision of galaxies in this cluster.

8. I Zwicky 18

The blue dwarf galaxy I Zwicky 18 is the youngest known galaxy. Its age is only 500 million years (the age of the Milky Way is 12 billion years) and it is essentially in an embryonic state. This is a giant cloud of cold hydrogen and helium.

9. NGC 6744

NGC 6744 is a large spiral galaxy that astronomers believe is one of the most similar to our Milky Way. The galaxy, located about 30 million light-years from Earth, has a remarkably similar elongated core and spiral arms to the Milky Way.

10. NGC 6872

The galaxy, known as NGC 6872, is the second largest spiral galaxy ever discovered by scientists. Many regions of active star formation were found in it. Since NGC 6872 has virtually no free hydrogen left to form stars, it is sucking it out of the neighboring galaxy IC 4970.

11. MACS J0416

Found 4.3 billion light-years from Earth, galaxy MACS J0416 looks more like some kind of light show at a fancy disco. In fact, behind the bright purple and pink colors lies an event of colossal proportions - the collision of two galaxy clusters.

12. M60 and NGC 4647 - galactic pair

Although gravitational forces pull most galaxies toward each other, there is no evidence that this is happening to neighboring Messier 60 and NGC 4647, nor is there any evidence that they are moving away from each other. Like a couple living together long ago, these two galaxies race side by side through cold, dark space.

13. Messier 81

Located near Messier 25, Messier 81 is a spiral galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center that is 70 million times the mass of the Sun. M81 is home to many short-lived but very hot blue stars. Gravitational interaction with M82 resulted in plumes of hydrogen gas stretching between both galaxies.

About 600 million years ago, the galaxies NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 crashed into each other, beginning a massive exchange of stars and galactic matter. Because of their appearance, these galaxies are called antennas.

15. Galaxy Sombrero

The Sombrero Galaxy is one of the most popular among amateur astronomers. It gets its name because it looks like this headdress thanks to its bright core and large central bulge.

16. 2MASX J16270254 + 4328340

This galaxy, blurry in all photographs, is known under the rather complex name 2MASX J16270254 + 4328340. As a result of the merger of two galaxies, a “fine fog consisting of millions of stars” was formed. This "fog" is believed to be slowly dissipating as the galaxy reaches the end of its lifespan.

17. NGC 5793

Not too strange (though very pretty) at first glance, spiral galaxy NGC 5793 is better known for a rare phenomenon: masers. People are familiar with lasers, which emit light in the visible region of the spectrum, but few know about masers, which emit light in the microwave range.

18. Triangulum Galaxy

The photo shows the nebula NGC 604, located in one of the spiral arms of the galaxy Messier 33. More than 200 very hot stars heat the ionized hydrogen in this nebula, causing it to fluoresce.

19. NGC 2685

NGC 2685, also sometimes called a spiral galaxy, is located in the constellation Ursa Major. As one of the first polar ring galaxies found, NGC 2685 has an outer ring of gas and stars orbiting the galaxy's poles, making it one of the rarest types of galaxies. Scientists still don't know what causes these polar rings to form.

20. Messier 94

Messier 94 looks like a terrible hurricane that was removed from orbit on Earth. This galaxy is surrounded by bright blue rings of actively forming stars.

21. Pandora Cluster

Formally known as Abell 2744, this galaxy has been nicknamed the Pandora cluster due to a number of strange phenomena resulting from the collision of several smaller clusters of galaxies. There is real chaos going on inside.

22. NGC 5408

What looks more like a colorful birthday cake in the photos is an irregular galaxy in the constellation Centaurus. It is notable for the fact that it emits extremely powerful x-rays.

23. Whirlpool Galaxy

The Whirlpool Galaxy, officially known as M51a or NGC 5194, is large enough and close to the Milky Way to be visible in the night sky even with binoculars. It was the first spiral galaxy to be classified and is of particular interest to scientists due to its interaction with the dwarf galaxy NGC 5195.

24.SDSS J1038+4849

The galaxy cluster SDSS J1038+4849 is one of the most attractive clusters ever found by astronomers. He looks like a real smiley face in space. The eyes and nose are galaxies, and the curved line of the "mouth" is due to the effects of gravitational lensing.

25. NGC3314a and NGC3314b

Although these two galaxies look like they are colliding, this is actually an optical illusion. There are tens of millions of light years between them.

Studying the most distant galaxies may reveal objects billions of light years away, but even with perfect technology, the spatial gap between the most distant galaxy and the Big Bang will remain vast.

Looking into the Universe, we see light everywhere, at all distances that our telescopes can look at. But at some point we will come across limitations. One of them is imposed by the cosmic structure that forms in the Universe: we can only see stars, galaxies, etc., only if they emit light. Without this, our telescopes cannot see anything. Another limitation when using forms of astronomy other than light is the limitation on how much of the Universe has been accessible to us since the Big Bang. These two quantities may not be related to each other, and it is on this topic that our reader asks us a question:

Why is the redshift of the CMB in the range of 1000, although the highest redshift of any galaxy we have seen is 11?

First we must understand what has been happening in our Universe since the Big Bang.



The observable Universe may extend 46 billion light years in all directions from our point of view, but there are certainly other parts of it that are unobservable to us, and perhaps they are even infinite.

The entire set of what we know, see, observe, and interact with is called the “observable universe.” There are likely even more regions of the Universe beyond, and over time we will be able to see more and more of these regions as light from distant objects finally reaches us after a journey of billions of years through space. We can see what we see (and more, not less) due to a combination of three factors:

• A finite amount of time has passed since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years.


• The speed of light, the maximum speed for any signal or particle moving through the Universe, is finite and constant.


• The very fabric of space has been stretching and expanding since the Big Bang.

Timeline of the history of the observable universe

What we see today is the result of these three factors, together with the original distribution of matter and energy operating according to the laws of physics throughout the history of the Universe. If we want to know what the Universe was like at any early point in time, we just need to observe what it is like today, measure all the related parameters, and calculate what it was like in the past. To do this we will need a lot of observations and measurements, but Einstein's equations, although so difficult, are at least unambiguous. The resulting results result in two equations, known as the Friedmann equations, and every student of cosmology faces the task of solving them directly. But to be honest, we have been able to make some amazing measurements of the parameters of the Universe.

Looking towards the north pole of the Milky Way Galaxy, we can peer into the depths of space. This image contains hundreds of thousands of galaxies, and each pixel is a different galaxy.

We know how fast it is expanding today. We know what the density of matter is in any direction we look. We know how many structures form at all scales, from globular clusters to dwarf galaxies, from large galaxies to galaxy groups, clusters and large-scale filamentary structures. We know how much normal matter, dark matter, dark energy, and also smaller components such as neutrinos, radiation, and even black holes are in the Universe. And only from this information, extrapolating back in time, can we calculate both the size of the Universe and the rate of its expansion at any moment in its cosmic history.

Logarithmic graph of the size of the observable Universe versus age

Today, our observable Universe extends approximately 46.1 billion light years in all directions from our point of view. At this distance is the starting point of an imaginary particle that set off at the moment of the Big Bang and, traveling at the speed of light, would arrive to us today, 13.8 billion years later. In principle, at this distance all the gravitational waves left over from cosmic inflation - the condition that preceded the Big Bang, set up the Universe and provided all the initial conditions - were generated.

Gravitational waves created by cosmic inflation are the oldest signal that humanity could, in principle, detect. They were born at the end of cosmic inflation and at the very beginning of the hot Big Bang.

But there are other signals left in the Universe. When it was 380,000 years old, residual radiation from the Big Bang stopped scattering from free charged particles as they formed neutral atoms. And these photons, after forming atoms, continue to be redshifted along with the expansion of the Universe, and can be seen today using a microwave or radio antenna/telescope. But due to the rapid rate of expansion of the Universe in the early stages, the "surface" that "glows" to us with this residual light - the cosmic microwave background - is only 45.2 billion light years away. The distance from the beginning of the Universe to the place where the Universe was after 380,000 years is equal to 900 million light years!

Cold fluctuations (blue) in the CMB are not colder per se, but simply represent areas of increased gravitational pull due to increased density of matter. Hot (red) regions are hotter because the radiation in these regions lives in a shallower gravitational well. Over time, denser regions are more likely to grow into stars, galaxies and clusters, while less dense regions are less likely to do so.

It will be a long time before we find the most distant galaxy in the Universe that we have discovered. Although simulations and calculations show that the very first stars could have formed 50-100 million years after the beginning of the Universe, and the first galaxies after 200 million years, we have not yet looked that far back (although there is hope that after the launch next year James Webb Space Telescope we can do this!). Today, the cosmic record is held by the galaxy shown below, which existed when the Universe was 400 million years old - this is only 3% of its current age. However, this galaxy, GN-z11, is located only 32 billion light-years away: that's about 14 billion light-years from the “edge” of the observable Universe.

The most distant galaxy discovered: GN-z11, photo from the GOODS-N observation carried out by the Hubble telescope.

The reason for this is that in the beginning the rate of expansion dropped very quickly over time. By the time galaxy Gz-11 existed as we see it, the Universe was expanding 20 times faster than it is today. When the CMB was emitted, the Universe was expanding 20,000 times faster than it is today. At the time of the Big Bang, as far as we know, the Universe was expanding 10 36 times faster, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times faster than it is today. Over time, the rate of expansion of the Universe has greatly decreased.

And this is very good for us! The balance between the primary expansion rate and the total amount of energy in the Universe in all its forms is perfectly maintained, up to the error of our observations. If there had been even a little more matter or radiation in the universe early on, it would have collapsed back billions of years ago and we wouldn't exist. If there was too little matter or radiation in the universe early on, it would expand so quickly that particles would not be able to meet each other to even form atoms, let alone more complex structures such as galaxies, stars, planets and people . The cosmic story that the Universe tells us is a story of extreme balance, thanks to which we exist.

The intricate balance between the rate of expansion and the overall density of the Universe is so delicate that even a deviation of 0.00000000001% in either direction would render the Universe completely uninhabitable for any life, stars or even planets at any given time.

If our best current theories are correct, then the first true galaxies should have formed between 120 and 210 million years ago. This corresponds to a distance from us to them of 35-37 billion light years, and a distance from the most distant galaxy to the edge of the observable Universe of 9-11 billion light years today. This is extremely far away, and speaks to one surprising fact: the Universe expanded extremely quickly in the early stages, and today it is expanding much more slowly. 1% of the age of the Universe is responsible for 20% of its total expansion!

The history of the Universe is full of fantastic events, but since inflation ended and the Big Bang occurred, the rate of expansion has fallen rapidly, and is slowing down as density continues to decrease.

The expansion of the Universe stretches the wavelength of light (and is responsible for the redshift we see), and the large speed of this expansion is responsible for the large distance between the microwave background and the most distant galaxy. But the size of the Universe today reveals something else astonishing: incredible effects that have occurred over time. Over time, the Universe will continue to expand more and more, and by the time it is ten times its age today, the distances will have increased so much that we will no longer be able to see any galaxies except members of our local group, even with a telescope equivalent to Hubble. Enjoy all that is visible today, the great diversity of what is present on all cosmic scales. It won't last forever!

The universe is a damn big place. When we look at the night sky, almost everything that is visible to the naked eye is part of our galaxy: a star, a cluster of stars, a nebula. Behind the stars of the Milky Way, for example, is the Triangulum Galaxy. We find these “island worlds” everywhere we look in the Universe, even in the darkest and emptiest pockets of space, if we can only gather enough light to look deep enough.

Most of these galaxies are so distant that even a photon traveling at the speed of light would take millions or billions of years to travel through intergalactic space. It was once emitted by the surface of a distant star, and now it has finally reached us. And while a speed of 299,792,458 meters per second seems incredible, the fact that we've only been 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang means that the distance light has traveled is still finite.

You might think that the farthest galaxy from us should be no further than 13.8 billion light years away, but that would be wrong. You see, besides the fact that light moves at a finite speed through the Universe, there is another, less obvious fact: the fabric of the Universe itself is expanding over time.

Solutions to general relativity that ruled out this possibility altogether appeared in 1920, but observations that came later - and showed that the distance between galaxies was increasing - allowed us not only to confirm the expansion of the Universe, but even to measure the rate of expansion and how it changed over time. The galaxies we see today were much further away from us when they first emitted the light we receive today.

Galaxy EGS8p7 currently holds the record for remoteness. With a measured redshift of 8.63, our reconstruction of the universe tells us that the light from this galaxy took 13.24 billion years to reach us. A little more math and we'll find that we're seeing this object when the universe was just 573 million years old, just 4% of its current age.

But since the Universe has been expanding all this time, this galaxy is not 13.24 billion light years away; in fact, it is already 30.35 billion light years away. And let's not forget: if we could instantly send a signal from this galaxy to us, it would cover a distance of 30.35 billion light years. But if you instead send a photon from this galaxy towards us, then thanks to dark energy and the expansion of the fabric of space, it will never reach us. This galaxy is already gone. The only reason we can observe it with the Keck and Hubble telescopes is that the light-blocking neutral gas in the direction of this galaxy turns out to be quite rare.

Hubble mirror compared to James Webb mirror

But don't think that this galaxy is the most distant of the most distant galaxies we will ever see. We see galaxies at such a distance as much as our equipment and the Universe allow us: the less neutral gas, the larger and brighter the galaxy, the more sensitive our instrument, the farther we see. In a few years, the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to look even further, since it will be able to capture light of longer wavelengths (and therefore higher redshift), will be able to see light that is not blocked by neutral gas, will be able to see galaxies fainter than our modern ones telescopes (Hubble, Spitzer, Keck).

In theory, the very first galaxies should appear at a redshift of 15-20.

Those who have a little idea about the Universe are well aware that the cosmos is constantly in motion. The universe is expanding every second, becoming larger and larger. Another thing is that on the scale of human perception of the world, it is quite difficult to understand the size of what is happening and imagine the structure of the Universe. In addition to our galaxy, in which the Sun is located and we are located, there are dozens, hundreds of other galaxies. No one knows the exact number of distant worlds. How many galaxies are in the Universe can only be known approximately by creating a mathematical model of the cosmos.

Therefore, given the size of the Universe, we can easily assume that tens, hundreds of billions of light years from Earth, there are worlds similar to ours.

Space and worlds that surround us

Our galaxy, which received the beautiful name “Milky Way,” was, according to many scientists, the center of the universe just a few centuries ago. In fact, it turned out that this is only part of the Universe, and there are other galaxies of various types and sizes, large and small, some further, others closer.

In space, all objects are closely interconnected, move in a certain order and occupy an allotted place. The planets we know, the stars we know well, black holes, and our solar system itself are located in the Milky Way galaxy. The name is not accidental. Even ancient astronomers, observing the night sky, compared the space around us to a milk track, where thousands of stars look like drops of milk. The Milky Way Galaxy, the celestial galactic objects in our field of vision, make up the nearby cosmos. What may be beyond the visibility of telescopes became known only in the 20th century.

Subsequent discoveries, which expanded our cosmos to the size of the Metagalaxy, led scientists to the theory of the Big Bang. A grandiose cataclysm occurred almost 15 billion years ago and served as an impetus for the beginning of the processes of formation of the Universe. One stage of the substance was replaced by another. From dense clouds of hydrogen and helium, the first beginnings of the Universe began to form - protogalaxies consisting of stars. All this happened in the distant past. The light of many celestial bodies, which we can observe in the strongest telescopes, is only a farewell greeting. Millions of stars, if not billions, that dotted our sky are located a billion light years from Earth, and have long ceased to exist.

Map of the Universe: nearest and farthest neighbors

Our Solar System and other cosmic bodies observed from Earth are relatively young structural formations and our closest neighbors in the vast Universe. For a long time, scientists believed that the dwarf galaxy closest to the Milky Way was the Large Magellanic Cloud, located only 50 kiloparsecs. Only very recently have the real neighbors of our galaxy become known. In the constellation Sagittarius and in the constellation Canis Major there are small dwarf galaxies whose mass is 200-300 times less than the mass of the Milky Way, and the distance to them is just over 30-40 thousand light years.

These are one of the smallest universal objects. In such galaxies the number of stars is relatively small (on the order of several billion). As a rule, dwarf galaxies gradually merge or are absorbed by larger formations. The speed of the expanding Universe, which is 20-25 km/s, will unwittingly lead neighboring galaxies to a collision. When this will happen and how it will turn out, we can only guess. The collision of galaxies is happening all this time, and due to the transience of our existence, it is not possible to observe what is happening.

Andromeda, two to three times the size of our galaxy, is one of the closest galaxies to us. It continues to be one of the most popular among astronomers and astrophysicists and is located just 2.52 million light years from Earth. Like our galaxy, Andromeda is a member of the Local Group of galaxies. The size of this giant cosmic stadium is three million light years across, and the number of galaxies present in it is about 500. However, even such a giant as Andromeda looks short in comparison with the galaxy IC 1101.

This largest spiral galaxy in the Universe is located more than a hundred million light years away and has a diameter of more than 6 million light years. Despite containing 100 trillion stars, the galaxy is primarily composed of dark matter.

Astrophysical parameters and types of galaxies

The first space explorations carried out at the beginning of the 20th century provided plenty of food for thought. The cosmic nebulae discovered through the lens of a telescope, of which more than a thousand were eventually counted, were the most interesting objects in the Universe. For a long time, these bright spots in the night sky were considered to be gas accumulations that were part of the structure of our galaxy. Edwin Hubble in 1924 managed to measure the distance to a cluster of stars and nebulae and made a sensational discovery: these nebulae are nothing more than distant spiral galaxies, independently wandering across the scale of the Universe.

An American astronomer was the first to suggest that our Universe is made up of many galaxies. Space exploration in the last quarter of the 20th century, observations made using spacecraft and technology, including the famous Hubble telescope, confirmed these assumptions. Space is limitless and our Milky Way is far from the largest galaxy in the Universe and, moreover, is not its center.

Only with the advent of powerful technical means of observation, the Universe began to take on clear outlines. Scientists are faced with the fact that even such huge formations as galaxies can differ in their structure and structure, shape and size.

Through the efforts of Edwin Hubble, the world received a systematic classification of galaxies, dividing them into three types:

• spiral;
• elliptical;
• incorrect.

Elliptical and spiral galaxies are the most common types. These include our Milky Way galaxy, as well as our neighboring Andromeda galaxy and many other galaxies in the Universe.

Elliptical galaxies have the shape of an ellipse and are elongated in one direction. These objects lack sleeves and often change their shape. These objects also differ from each other in size. Unlike spiral galaxies, these cosmic monsters do not have a clearly defined center. There is no core in such structures.

According to the classification, such galaxies are designated by the Latin letter E. All currently known elliptical galaxies are divided into subgroups E0-E7. The distribution into subgroups is carried out depending on the configuration: from almost circular galaxies (E0, E1 and E2) to highly elongated objects with indices E6 and E7. Among the elliptical galaxies there are dwarfs and true giants with diameters of millions of light years.

There are two subtypes of spiral galaxies:

• galaxies presented in the form of a crossed spiral;
• normal spirals.

The first subtype is distinguished by the following features. In shape, such galaxies resemble a regular spiral, but in the center of such a spiral galaxy there is a bridge (bar), giving rise to arms. Such bridges in a galaxy are usually the result of physical centrifugal processes that divide the galactic core into two parts. There are galaxies with two nuclei, the tandem of which makes up the central disk. When the nuclei meet, the bridge disappears and the galaxy becomes normal, with one center. There is also a bridge in our Milky Way galaxy, in one of the arms of which our Solar system is located. From the Sun to the center of the galaxy, the path, according to modern estimates, is 27 thousand light years. The thickness of the Orion Cygnus arm, in which our Sun and our planet reside, is 700 thousand light years.

In accordance with the classification, spiral galaxies are designated by the Latin letters Sb. Depending on the subgroup, there are other designations for spiral galaxies: Dba, Sba and Sbc. The difference between the subgroups is determined by the length of the bar, its shape and the configuration of the sleeves.

Spiral galaxies can range in size from 20,000 light-years to 100,000 light-years in diameter. Our Milky Way galaxy is in the “golden mean”, its size gravitating toward medium-sized galaxies.

The rarest type is irregular galaxies. These universal objects are large clusters of stars and nebulae that do not have a clear shape or structure. In accordance with the classification, they received the indices Im and IO. As a rule, structures of the first type do not have a disk or it is weakly expressed. Often such galaxies can be seen to have similar arms. Galaxies with IO indices are a chaotic collection of stars, clouds of gas and dark matter. Prominent representatives of this group of galaxies are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

All galaxies: regular and irregular, elliptical and spiral, consist of trillions of stars. The space between stars and their planetary systems is filled with dark matter or clouds of cosmic gas and dust particles. In the spaces between these voids there are black holes, large and small, which disturb the idyll of cosmic tranquility.

Based on the existing classification and research results, we can answer with some confidence the question of how many galaxies there are in the Universe and what type they are. There are more spiral galaxies in the Universe. They constitute more than 55% of the total number of all universal objects. There are half as many elliptical galaxies - only 22% of the total number. There are only 5% of irregular galaxies similar to the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds in the Universe. Some galaxies are neighboring us and are in the field of view of the most powerful telescopes. Others are in the farthest space, where dark matter predominates and the blackness of endless space is more visible in the lens.

Galaxies up close

All galaxies belong to certain groups, which in modern science are usually called clusters. The Milky Way is part of one of these clusters, which contains up to 40 more or less known galaxies. The cluster itself is part of a supercluster, a larger group of galaxies. The Earth, along with the Sun and the Milky Way, is part of the Virgo supercluster. This is our actual cosmic address. Together with our galaxy, there are more than two thousand other galaxies in the Virgo cluster, elliptical, spiral and irregular.

The map of the Universe, which astronomers rely on today, gives an idea of ​​what the Universe looks like, what its shape and structure are. All clusters gather around voids or bubbles of dark matter. It is possible to think that dark matter and bubbles are also filled with some objects. Perhaps this is antimatter, which, contrary to the laws of physics, forms similar structures in a different coordinate system.

Current and future state of galaxies

Scientists believe that it is impossible to create a general portrait of the Universe. We have visual and mathematical data about the cosmos that is within our understanding. The real scale of the Universe is impossible to imagine. What we see through a telescope is starlight that has been coming to us for billions of years. Perhaps the real picture today is completely different. As a result of cosmic cataclysms, the most beautiful galaxies in the Universe could already turn into empty and ugly clouds of cosmic dust and dark matter.

It cannot be ruled out that in the distant future, our galaxy will collide with a larger neighbor in the Universe or swallow a dwarf galaxy existing next door. What the consequences of such universal changes will be remains to be seen. Despite the fact that the convergence of galaxies occurs at the speed of light, earthlings are unlikely to witness a universal catastrophe. Mathematicians have calculated that just over three billion Earth years are left before the fatal collision. Whether life will exist on our planet at that time is a question.

Other forces can also interfere with the existence of stars, clusters and galaxies. Black holes, which are still known to man, are capable of swallowing a star. Where is the guarantee that such monsters of enormous size, hiding in dark matter and in the voids of space, will not be able to swallow the galaxy entirely?