The largest galaxies in the universe are how big compared to the Milky Way?

Question

I understand that there is a percentage of galaxies that so far overmatch ours in size that one of them could eat the Milky Way for breakfast and not bother to count the calories. Is that so? How common are they? Please list a few such galaxies and give a size comparison. On a scale where our galaxy were represented as a centimeter in diameter, how big would the Monster Galaxy be?

Answer 1

There are monster elliptical galaxies called Cd galaxies, which can contain the mass of 100 Milky Way galaxies, and extend up to a million light years across. The halo of globular clusters and stars around them is much larger than the main mass of the galaxy yet again. These galaxies grew so huge from both absorbing other galaxies in mergers and feeding upon gas streaming in from intergalactic space. These galaxies incredibly do form new stars in spurts, and add them to their already monstrous bulk. They're quite rare and seem to exist only in massive and rich galaxy clusters. Clusters like the Corona Borealis Cluster and the Coma Cluster have these very big, extremely luminous galaxies at their hearts. They outshine all the other galaxies by a huge margin. NGC-4889 in Coma Berenices shines at about 12th magnitude but most of the other brighter members glimmer at 15th magnitude and fainter from more than 400 million light years away. There are however very large spirals and ellipticals out there that dwarf the Milky Way, one of them being M-31 which is about twice the diameter of our galaxy. Ellipticals such as M-87 in Virgo pack several Milky Way galaxies into a volume some 25,000 to 50,000 light years across, and have thousands of globular clusters. There are therefore galaxies in our local region of the Universe that can swallow up the Milkyway, one of which is M-31 which is approaching us at nearly 200 miles per second.

Answer 2

the largest galaxy is 1500 times greater than milky way.

Andromeda

http://space-and-times.blogspot.com

Answer 3

The largest galaxies in the Universe are giant elliptical galaxies, usually found in dense galaxy clusters. They can get up to dozens of times the mass of the Milky Way and have diameters as high as several million light years (the Milky Way is about 100000 light years from one side to the other). This is about 50 times as large in scale, so if the Milky Way were one centimeter wide, these large galaxies would be about half a meter wide. Comparable objects would be a button for the Milky Way and a pumpkin or beach ball for these elliptical galaxies. Note that the comparison of size is a little misleading because an elliptical galaxy of that size would have to be significantly less dense than the Milky Way, so it would be more like comparing a button made of solid gold with a beach ball full of feathers. They are also less luminous for their mass than the Milky Way. Elliptical galaxies make up about 15% of all the galaxies in the Universe, but only a small portion of these are the kinds of extremely large elliptical galaxies you're talking about. Spiral galaxies like the Milky Way or the Andromeda Galaxy are more common, forming around 60% of all galaxies in the Universe, while the remainding 25% or so of galaxies are irregular galaxies which don't have any clear geometric form and are usually the least massive (larger galaxies take on geometric forms through their higher gravity).

Answer 4

Giant ellipticals are the largest. They top out at some 10^13 solar masses, or roughly 100 times our Galaxy's mass. Size, some 100 kpc, or about three times the linear size (27 times the volume, roughly) of Milky Way.

Answer 5

As the others explain ellipticals are the most massive galaxies.  Ellipticals are thought to be the final result of the collision of one or more "regular" galaxies like the Milky Way which explains their huge masses.  The Andromeda galaxy, our nearest neighbor, is on a collision course with the Milky Way so at some distance future time what is left of the solar system, if anything, will be part of an elliptical.