35. DISTRIBUTION OF GALAXIES

We know that the universe is filled up with clusters and superclusters like that of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and its companions, containing billions and billions and billions of stars and much more!! Nevertheless here again: here is emptiness as well! It is estimated that the intergalactic distances in a cluster of galaxies is of the order of 10^24 cm = 10^6 lightyear!
Michael Strauss of the Princeton University constructed a map of far remote galaxies and it appeared that they were distributed in a very homogeneous way The whole projected surface of the sky has been covered with it, an effect of the two-dimensional reproduction, in reality the mutual distances were on average a million lightyear.

Space is really unimaginable empty, albeit that we have to be cautious with such statements: astronomers responsible for tthe Hubble-telescope just took it as read because of Christmas and oriented their telescope to an according to their opinion empty part of space and let it gone its way, all measuring. On New Years day, after 240 hours measuring, they went to the telescope interested in the results. It appeared that the picture was filled completely with more than thousand galaxies. If that would be valid for the whole universe, there should be more than 50 billion galaxies! Hubble had proved that the boundary of the universe lies very much farther than previously assumed and such a statement is still valid.

An empty universum it seems, but it does not mean that there is no mutual contact, for as already said about our Milky Way, starsystems can absorb other systems, being fully integrated. Collisions between galaxies occur continuously, of which the image above is a nice example. What happens then is giantic, an enormous intensive integration process characterized by the creation of many new stars, Such a process takes billions of years before finally one single, more massive, galaxy results.
The image shows two colliding galaxies in the constellation CANIS MAJOR at a distance of 140 million ly being completely integrated within a 500 million years.

Below a picture of one of the largest galaxies in the universum: the SPIDERWEB GALAXY (constellation HYDRA) on a distance of 10,6 billion ly from earth. In the middle of the "web" there is a very large black hole that captures its victims - smaller galaxies of the size of our Milky Way - in an inescapable net of gravitation. Hundreds of galaxies in this cluster at distances of hundredthousands ly and speeds up to hundreds km/sec. are absorbed by this "black widow".