Galaxies Beyond Human Comprehension

Beyond human comprehension means the Universe is a really big place on a scale so large that the mind can scarcely comprehend in any meaningful way. For example, the photograph with this article shows massive clusters -not of individual stars- but of whole galaxies, each containing on the order of 400 billion stars! Each dot of light is a galaxy! How many can you count in this one narrow view? How many stars would that be, how many worlds?

Galaxies Beyond Human Comprehension


Thousands of galaxies crowd into this Herschel image of the distant Universe. Each dot is an entire galaxy containing billions of stars. For more than a decade, astronomers have puzzled over strangely bright galaxies in the distant Universe. These ‘luminous infrared galaxies’ appear to be creating stars at such phenomenal rates that they defy conventional theories of galaxy formation.



ESA’s Herschel infrared space observatory, with its ability for very sensitive mapping over wide areas, has seen thousands of these galaxies and pinpointed their locations, showing for the first time that they are packing themselves closely together, forming large clusters of galaxies by the force of their mutual gravity.



Source: ESA - oshi