Here we are, twenty thousand (20,000) lightyears away from the center of our galaxy and our galaxy is over a hundred thousand (100,000) lightyears across, but even that, as large as it is, is kind of a speck in the cosmic distance scale.
Our Milky Way Galaxy may appear big to us, but compared to some others out there it's actually pretty small.
Andromeda, our nearest galactic neighbor, is over two hundred thousand (200,000) lightyears across, twice the size of The Milky Way.
M-87 is the largest elliptical galaxy in our own cosmic backyard, and much bigger than Andromeda.
But M-87 is tiny compared to this giant. Six million (6,000,000) lightyears across IC 1011 is the biggest galaxy ever found. It's sixty times larger than our Milky Way.
We know galaxies are big and they're everywhere, but why is that?
