If you ever see it, consider that that light has taken over 2 million years to reach your eye...!!!
It makes you feel really small. It's all very impressive these big stars in our galaxy and I know that it is unbelievably large. We will never be able (?) to reach the end of it. We might build a telescope that can see very far into space but that is it. But what I would like to know is, what is beyond the galaxy? If it ends somewhere, what is behind it? Nothing? Another galaxy? Is this (in our eyes) very large galaxy just a piece of dust for something (someone) else?
Crash(Is there somebody out there..........)
Our galaxy is one of many... since our system is near the fringe of our home galaxy, we can look outward and see many, many more. As I said, M31, aka the Andromeda Galaxy, is visible to the naked eye if the sky is very dark... it looks like a faint smudge of light. But with a decent scope, it is clearly a huge swirling mass of billions of stars. It is believed that our galaxy is similar in shape and size.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Galaxy
We're also rather fortunate that there are about 30 other galaxies within a mere 30 million light-years of our own... pretty easy to see with most telescopes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Group
But many, many more have been seen... and some are extremely far away.
Beyond that...? Who knows? Probably more of the same... large and small clusters of stars, huge blobs of gas and dust... black holes, etc... considering how much empty space there is out there, there's an awful lot of stuff.
I've always been annoyed by attempts to determine the size of the universe, since "universe" means "everything that is". If therer is a limit to "everything there is", what lies beyond it? Nothing?
Isn't a lot of nothing part of "everything"? I don't get it.
But there is a limit to what we can detect right now with the available technology.
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I'm done now, continue with the serious discussions.
