Talk:List of galaxies

List of largest galaxies removed?
The entire list of largest galaxies seems to have been removed and typing that in just leads to the list of galaxies page, and there isn't even a list of largest galaxies there. Can someone bring the list back? Jcharlesk (talk) 22:59, 15 June 2018 (UTC)


 * That page was deleted and redirected here. It was fully of incorrect and inconsistent numbers. See the AFD for details. - Parejkoj (talk) 01:26, 18 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Oh. Well, someone should at least add a section for largest and smallest galaxies, otherwise the redirect is kind of pointless. Jcharlesk (talk) 01:35, 19 June 2018 (UTC)


 * We'd have to settle on which metric to use, and then go and find the correct values for a large enough sample of galaxies: as it is, most of the galaxy "sizes" that I've looked at (from the items at the top of that old page) were incorrect, or did not use a measurement that was a reasonable metric for galaxy "size." - Parejkoj (talk) 06:45, 19 June 2018 (UTC)


 * I believe the metric should be the accepted (high probability) galactic halo dimensions (I.E. not speculated dark matter mass or halos), which without rechecking would have to start with IC 1101 and go down from there, and that is a very sound and sensible measure of size that is comprehensive enough by our understanding of the observable universe in my view. It would have to obviously be created and managed more reliably than before, and needs to be done again, being the main parameter among all of the others and is the only one not listed.  Another entire list by mass would be appropriate.  --JLavigne508 (talk) 13:19, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
 * How do you propose that this "accepted galactic halo dimension" be measured? That is not a direct observable, and has to be modeled somehow. Which model should we use? That seems to border on WP:OR. - Parejkoj (talk) 17:21, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

Correction of absolute magnitude
Almost all of the galaxies lised on this page have a minor error in the info template on the right in their article pages. The error is a false figure given for the absolute magnitude of the galaxy.

For example, for M51 the figure given for abs. mag. was 12.7 while the true abs. magn. is -21.5

However, 12.7 is roughly M51's surface brightness, so I assume the editor unwittingly picked the wrong value. Nevertheless, almost all of the galaxies listed here have to be updated. How to calculate the abs mag see the article. Albester 20:02, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

All of the galaxies??
Does this list include only major galaxies or does it include all of the galaxies known? I was kind of expecting more...
 * I too was wondering this. How complete is this list?--SeizureDog 02:28, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Someone vandalized it a few weeks ago, and the person who cleaned it up unfortunately was not careful, and stripped out the lines that had been altered instead of restoring them. --dreish~talk 20:44, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
 * The list primarily contains well known and well studied galaxies, nothing more, nothing less Albester 13:09, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I do not see every "well-known or well-studied" galaxy on this list. This list is simply poorly maintained.GeorgeJBendo 17:06, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree, I may try tackling this list once I am finished with List of Spiral Galaxies. Imaninjapiratetalk to me 09:24, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

old list

 * —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.51.9.220 (talk) 08:25, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Please help integrate the old list into the new tabular format, so that the old list can be removed from the article. 70.51.8.75 (talk) 08:49, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Guys! there are 200,000,000,000 galaxies as of 1/1/2010! There are hundreds of galaxies discovered every day! How could we possibly fit ALL the galaxies in such an article!? --Nate5713 (talk) 00:15, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I would like to see a new list of binocular range galaxies that can be seen with 20x or 25x binoculars. The list should include magnitude and distance. Sorted by magnitude. This would be an extension of the galaxies that can be seen with the eye.Maxeng (talk) 13:16, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Request for removal from the list
Can I remove from the list NGC 2 and NGC 3 since the information about these galaxies is deficient. -Pika ten10 (talk) 06:34, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

excised table
I removed this table, because it's too hard to confirm the disparate announcements, retractions, and counterclaims on these most distant galaxies... 70.51.8.71 (talk) 08:06, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

highest z - circa 1957
cluster 1448 z=0.4 V=120,000km/s ... anyone know about this? 70.51.8.200 (talk) 07:15, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
 * 1958 Baum - z=0.29 & z=0.35 ; z=0.44 for another galaxy in 3C 295's cluster (Cl 1409+524)? 70.55.85.38 (talk) 10:10, 22 July 2008 (UTC)


 * 1936 - Humason - 100 galaxies Z 70.51.9.22 (talk) 10:05, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

articles should be created
The 1956, 1936 and 1925 galaxy redshift catalogs should probably each have a wikipedia article of their own. 70.51.11.13 (talk) 08:11, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

to be removed
The first section "List" should be removed when everything is integrated into the new tabular form below it. 70.51.9.124 (talk) 11:07, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Baby Boom Galaxy
exactly what record does the Baby Boom Galaxy hold? user:Fatal!ty put it into the most distant galaxy table (which is wrong, since it has never been the most distant, and was not discovered in 1980, where he put it into the table). I've removed it from the wrong table. It is now grouped with several others as the currently most distant by type. The article page says it's the brightest starburst galaxy in the very distant universe. This claim makes several exceptions possible, implying that it is *not* the brightest starburst galaxy anywhere in the universe, and that it is *not* the brightest galaxy in the very distant universe, and it is *not* the most distant starburst galaxy... so it doesn't seem to be any kind of record breaker, except in combination. 70.51.9.124 (talk) 11:18, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

excised unsourced speculations
This "sanskrit origin" is not attested to in the external link. Since "Milky Way" has nothing to do with "river" it is highly dubious that that is the source of the saying, or that it is 3500 years old as stated, since no supporting material is provided.

65.94.252.195 (talk) 10:11, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

This POV speculation of origin is not on the Milky Way article page. 65.94.252.195 (talk) 10:28, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

HUDF-JD2
I have removed this entry because (1) it was not the most distant galaxy, it was only the most distant in the HUDF image. (2) it was placed in the 1990's when it was discovered in 2005 according to the entry on the table, so it's in the wrong place. (3) HCM-6A, discovered in 2002 was already much further away at 6.56, so JD2 would not possibly be the most distant.

184.144.163.181 (talk) 06:14, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

The most massive
It says that Messier 87 is the most massive but in it's article it says that it's "only" 200 times more massive than the Milky Way whereas the IC 1101 in it's own article is 2000 more massive than the Milky Way. I think it should be fixed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 186.212.235.217 (talk) 16:34, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Where does it say it's 2000 times more massive? There's no mass listed at IC 1101 at all. All it says is that the cluster in which IC 1101 resides is 100trillion solar masses, which is not the galaxy itself. 65.94.45.185 (talk) 10:55, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

It's in the IC 1101 article. It's like: "Being more than 50 times the size of the Milky Way and 2000 times as massive." It's right after they mention the 100 trillion solar masses. If you go there you'll see it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 187.58.49.118 (talk) 16:19, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

Needing a carefull revision
I had never read so much nonsense. I could make some corrections, but it contains so many mistakes that I simply gave up reading. I mean, someone could make this a little bit more reliable just by following the links to the main articles about each celestial object and subject - as simple as that! 85.242.89.55 (talk) 03:25, 13 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Care to give some specific examples of things that should be fixed? - Parejkoj (talk) 06:38, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

Silly nicknames
I would encourage future editors to avoid all these silly nicknames like "Cartwheel Galaxy" and "Blue Waffle" and all this other nonsense. Nobody uses these names. Please use the Messier or NGC numbers instead. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.60.209.109 (talk) 23:05, 10 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Why? Cartwheel Galaxy is widely used and is the name of our article. Further, very few galaxies have Messier or NGC numbers, so we couldn't even list most of the galaxies on this page with that restriction. Your own example, of the Cartwheel Galaxy has no NGC number or Messier number. Indeed, this would be impossible, since it was discovered in 1941, long after Charles Messier died, and after JLE Dreyer completed the NGC. -- 76.65.128.222 (talk) 15:08, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

Omega Centauri as a Galaxy
Under the Naked-Eye Galaxies, the globular cluster Omega Centauri is listed with the note that a black hole was found in its core in 2010. However, while a popular idea, this is far from settled. Even the cited source (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010ApJ...719L..60N) admits that recent studies have drawn different conclusions on the existence of a central black hole. I recently completed a literature review on the galactic status of Omega Centauri as a major university project, and there is no shortage of papers proposing evidence for both sides of the argument, even in the years after the cited source of 2010. eg. http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.5011 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zachariasj (talk • contribs) 07:54, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

Distinction between spectroscopic and photometric redshifts
This article (and others) fails to distinguish between spectroscopic redshifts (which are generally precise and usually reliable) and photometric redshifts (which generally have larger error ranges, and more prone to being wrong). In terms of the most distant galaxies, it would be more conventional to quote the former as being secure, and the latter as providing "candidate" distant sources. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.69.126.165 (talk) 14:47, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

Bode's Galaxy - apparent magnitude
Why does this article says Bode's Galaxy (Messier 81) have an apparent magnitude of 7.89 when its own article says 6.94, which agrees with SEDS? 87.113.158.117 (talk) 00:44, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Removed Largest Galaxies section
IC 1101 is not 5 MLy in size. See Talk:IC_1101 for details. I've removed the "Galaxies by Size" section. It can be restored if someone wants to actually do the required ADS research to make it valid. - Parejkoj (talk) 00:25, 12 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Added wikilink to above, per WP:RTP, to clarify initialism. &mdash; DennisDallas (talk) 03:12, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

M102
In the section "Galaxies with some other notable feature", it is said of M102 that "This galaxy cannot be definitively identified, with the most likely candidate being NGC 5866, and a good chance of it being a misidentification of M101. Other candidates have also been suggested." However, it is known that it was a duplicate observation of M101 (see for example the book Messierin kohteet by Ursa; this reads certainly in many other books also), so it seems a bit strange with saying that NGC 5866 being the most likely candidate. K9re11 (talk) 10:47, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Correction of Galaxy Zoo figures.
Galaxy Zoo has not catalogued 50 million galaxies. It has classified over one million images, as one can read from the following links. Tens of millions of classifications have been made of those million galaxy images, as one can read in the lengthy and much edited Wikipedia Galaxy Zoo article. A Galaxy Zoo paper from 2014 explains in section 2.2:

Galaxy Zoo: CANDELS barred discs and bar fractions (full ref in article) http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/445/4/3466.full.pdf+html page 2 of 9, or page 3467 in MNRAS journal.

Quote: "Galaxy Zoo provides quantified visual morphologies by obtaining multiple independent classifications for each galaxy. Beginning in 2007, more than 1,000,000 galaxy images in total from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the HST have each been classified by typically ∼40 independent volunteers via a web interface."

"This work uses classifications collected during the fourth release of Galaxy Zoo, specifically of 49,555 images from the COSMOS, GOODS-South, and UDS fields in the CANDELS survey (hereafter GZ-CANDELS)."

http://www.galaxyzoo.org/#/story

That is why I'm changing it as the sentence at the moment is erroneous. It is also unreferenced.Richard Nowell (talk) 18:32, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

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"Most distant" trivia
This list is full of an almost unending litany of trivia about which was the most distant known at a particular time, which doesn't serve reader interests in any way because none of these factoids can be chronologically connected to each other in an alphabetical list. It's just a confusing mess. If we want to preserve that information at all (i.e., if we're sure it's not a WP:NOT failure), then a timeline table should be created, showing which was the most-distant-known until what date. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:06, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

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?SONASX?
Hello to all wiki users that working on space articles. Excuse me, I have several ideas about space and also multiverse. But I want a way to say them to people of the earth specially scientists. I want help from you to say my ideas and also anyone have not this ability to steal them. (( Thank you )) Geografi (talk) 17:20, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Universe=observable universe?
In the intro-

There are about one hundred billion galaxies in the universe (see list of nearest galaxies for a complete list), on the order of 100,000 in our Local Supercluster and an estimated number of about one to two trillion in all of the observable universe.

Makes no sense to me. The universe is the observable universe, correct? And the numbers should be one and the same?Chasrob (talk) 17:49, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Record holders / dates
The lists of "record holders" and the inclusion of the column "dates" seems to be somewhat confusing to me. For starters, the record holders for such things as "closest galaxy" in all certainty did not change during humanity's time on earth, only the closest or farthest known galaxies changed with the discovery of new galaxies. This needs some rephrasing IMO.

Then there's the "Date" column, which seems to be inconsistent. In most instances it seems to be the time in which the respective galaxy was the known closest or whatever object. Sometimes it seems to be the discovery of said galaxy (which of course in a way makes sense, since discovery makes it known, but shouldn't it be a period?). In either case, these "dates" overlap, are not explained, and probably have the wrong header anyway, since "1926-1928" isn't a "date" but a "time" at best. Also - "always" is a strange entry to have. --131.169.89.168 (talk) 13:47, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

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List of largest galaxies
Could someone try to help me compile a good list of largest galaxies, that then could be added to this page? Nussun05 (talk) 17:59, 8 December 2020 (UTC)
 * See above for an earlier discussion. If you want to compile such a list, you have to start by defining what measure of galaxy size you are planning to use, and then figuring out how to do a literature search on that definition. See the various discussions at Talk:IC_1101 for how fraught that can be. - Parejkoj (talk) 18:57, 8 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Probably half-light radius. Nussun05 (talk) 05:38, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

New largest galaxy?
So it seems like researchers have recently discovered the most massive galaxy (see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.05427.pdf (not peer-reviewed as of yet))? In any case, I'm not sure whether that would be included in the "Galaxies by size" section. I initially added it to the list, but removed it because I want to know what the others think. Due to the paper not being peer-reviewed yet, it might even be too soon to discuss this, in which case forgive me. Alpha Piscis Austrini (talk) 12:01, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
 * The size given in the paper is the size of the radio structure, not the galaxy itself. - Parejkoj (talk) 18:11, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

ironic
it's so ironic.. how people can take credit for work they did not do own their own....... i hope my point has been made. 105.184.140.188 (talk) 09:18, 11 June 2022 (UTC)

A revival of the "List of largest galaxies"
I have been involved with this list way back in 2014-15. When this was list was created, it was honestly laughable. It involved putting in any galaxy in there and giving some sort of random number, employing that this was the halo, the tail, or some other extended feature of the galaxy, with the references themselves being too vague or just plain citogenesis.

This is the prime example of why you should never make a list of astronomical objects without having a large amount of data, and how would you get that data from.

This list haunted me for the past few years. Only very recently did I decide that I have to do something about it. I uncovered the problems that the past list has experienced, and tried to address them (hopefully) with this draft: Draft:List of largest galaxies.

Dataset: This one is pretty straightforward, from the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database.

Standard for size determination: Reading the discussions above, I saw that most people are asking to "just measure the halo" of some sort. But as it turns out, there are decades of studies regarding this. The most commonly employed is the 25 mag/arcsec2 or some variation of it, which is even deduced as a standard for measuring galaxies. You would need to look no further about this than from NED, which usually uses this in the section "Quick Look Angular and Physical Diameters". You can check the draft about this.

And yes, they do not use apparent size for this. You cannot just go to SIMBAD and do the math (I found most data from SIMBAD at "C" quality, which is questionable). It is best to use D25.

Hopefully with this new definition, we can finally end the debate on halos, extended features, lobes, or any protrusions of a galaxy to be the determinant of the diameter. The methods in the draft have limitations, which I am still trying to search and uncover in ADS.

Numbers: The old list only uses the diameter of the major axis. Hopefully the new list would solve this that also includes the minor ones. I am currently havig the list assorted to decreasing major axis diameters but you can employ some sort of method to re-assort them (largest does not mean longest, I assume)

And this is where I am right now. I decided to place the cutoff point of the list to include galaxies above 153.8 kpc on any measure (essentially 500,000 light years in diameter), and so far I found 39 galaxies, with two in my notebook pending. (Spoilers: IC 1101 is not one of those 39, it is only 91.6 kpc; below the 153.8 kpc cutoff).

To produce that list is gruesome and draining. I have been working on it for most of the week, and I can say I am exhausted. I just want that draft to hopefully fly away as an article. This is why I need your help to work on it. If you have any questions, critiques, or relevant info, just reply in here. Thanks! SkyFlubbler (talk) 18:42, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

Additional note: I can already see even from the presently unfinished draft that it would be too long and complex to be just a section of an article. I would recommend it to be on its own article, with sections emphasizing the methods used in determining their diameters. SkyFlubbler (talk) 18:58, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

Pinging users Parejkoj and Nussun05. SkyFlubbler (talk) 19:01, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

geography
What is another name for the milky way galaxy 2405:204:322D:6EB1:0:0:2A1C:58B1 (talk) 09:48, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Most massive galaxy?
Is there any reference for ESO 145-6's mass? Also, is there any reference for IC 1101's 100 trillion solar masses claim? --The Space Enthusiast (talk) 16:20, 5 March 2023 (UTC)


 * For ESO 146-5 it would be this one, which states a mass of 2.7 ± 0.4 × 1013 . For IC 1101 however there is no such figure of 100 trillion or 1014, however this paper gave a mass of 9.15 ± 0.25 × 1013 for the entire Abell 2029 cluster, so it is unlikely that IC 1101 is more massive than this. SkyFlubbler (talk) 17:43, 14 March 2023 (UTC)