4.4 Million Galaxies Mapped

I can hardly get my mind around the distances between stars, never mind the 100 billion stars in our own galaxy, spread across over 100,000 light years. Now imagine we mapped 4.4 million galaxies, and were able to show this in a map, and this is what astronomers at Durham University have done, using data from LOFAR have done.

Each of those small specks of dust in the map don't just represent a single galaxy, but rather, the most energetic objects in our universe, quasars, galaxy clusters containing numerous supermassive black holes, like the Virgo clusters M87 galaxy.

Our own galaxy isn't very noisy in comparison, our supermassive black hole is like a dormant volcano, it's not dead, it still has magma but just isn't erupting, many galaxies around us have very active supermassive black holes, and many groups of galaxies are merging and forming super clusters with many of these kinds of galaxies.

The universe is unimaginably large, but work like this, helps us to begin to process the scale, even if it's simply to expand whatever we thought it was in the first instance.