GALAXIES

"Through a telescope, galaxies appear as delicate whorls of soft light, some barely visible, others distinct and surprisingly symmetrical."
-Excerpt from Advanced Skywatching by Robert Burnham, Alan Dyer, Robert A. Garfinkle, Martin George, Jeff Kanipe, and David H. Levy

Galaxies are made of gas, dust, and stars all held together by one powerful force-- gravity. Galaxies come in many different shapes, some shaped like spheres, others like shapeless clouds, others like pinwheels. Astronomers used to refer to galaxies as "spiral nebulae" because of their spiral shapes, and because they could not be categorized as stars. In 1926, an American astronomer known as Edwin Hubble, sorted the differently shaped galaxies into three major categories; ellipticals, spirals, and barred spirals.

Elliptical Galaxies

Ellipticals are usually shaped like footballs or spheres. One of the most common galaxy type in the universe are the faint dwarf ellipticals, they contain just a few million stars, and are no more than 1,000 light-years across. Which in my opinion is huge, but they are pretty small compared to the largest ellipticals. These are usually the rarest types of ellipticals, but are massive, stretching at around 100,000 light-years whilst containing possibly more than 10,000 billion stars. Whew.

Spirals