Largest-Known Spiral Galaxy Discovered

littlesparkvt writes "The spectacular barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872 has ranked among the biggest stellar systems for decades. Now a team of astronomers from the United States, Chile and Brazil has crowned it the largest-known spiral galaxy, based on archival data from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission."

Long Galaxy is Long.

[VortexCortex]

Link to more Nasa's images. [nasa.gov]
TFA says the elongated shape is likely do to interaction with a neighboring galaxy, which may have also spawned a nearby dwarf galaxy; Both visible primarily thanks to the ultraviolet instrumentation.

The tidal dwarf candidate is brighter in the ultraviolet than other
regions of the galaxy, a sign it bears a rich supply of hot young
stars less than 200 million years old.

Hmm, Sounds about like Hollywood...

Largest = longest

[EdgePenguin]

To clarify, this does not mean the most massive spiral galaxy found, it means the longest.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Also, this does not mean the largest quasar, but spiral galaxy.

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[Striikerr]

Well, I think that girth tends to matter more than length..

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[HornWumpus]

TMI. We don't care what you look for in a man.

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[Forty Two Tenfold]

That's what she said!

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[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, she was looking out the window when she said it.

Largest known...

[skandalfo]

Now just don't bother me until they discover an UNKNOWN one.

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[arth1]

Yeah, neither the submitter nor the editor can have much interest in astronomy, or they'd known that this galaxy wasn't discovered now.
Just the NGC number being this low should have alerted them.

For what it's worth, it was discovered by John F. W. Herschel in 1835 (Herschel catalog number 3816), and there are dozens of publications about it over the years.

Only a spiral

[Jeremy Erwin]

The largest known elliptical galaxy IC 1101 [wikipedia.org] has a diameter of 6 million light years.

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[feedayeen]

To be fair, IC 1101 is disturbed due to all of the collisions by those little galaxies the size of the Milky Way colliding into it.

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[Anonymous Coward]

The giant elliptical galaxies probably form from mergers of spiral galaxies (gravitational interactions smear out all the nice spiral patterns, and you're left with a featureless blob), so it's not surprising that the largest elliptical is larger than the largest spiral.

Largest-Known Spiral Galaxy Discovered

[grep -v '.*' *]

Yeah, right. What'll they say when they find out what's really out there is a giant fun-house convex mirror pointing right back at our galaxy?

THEN we'll finally get around to losing that weight that the galaxy's put on.

Quickly, get the news out

[bytesex]

Before we're overshadowed by this:

http://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/224-news-2013/2212-astronomers-discover-the-largest-structure-in-the-universe [ras.org.uk]

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[BigBunion]

"'Even travelling at the speed of light, it would take 4 billion light years to cross"

...

In a press release from The Royal Astronomical Society??? facepalm...

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[Punko]

On the upside, if you were the observer travelling at the speed of light, it would not seem like 4 Billion years to travel.

Upper limit on size?

[czarv10]

Does anyone know if there's an upper limit on the size of a spiral? It would have to be limited by the size of it's dark matter halo, correct? Had a brief stint in cosmology in grad school, still find this stuff cool.

Image Quality

[mk1004]

I know this is a composite image, but there's some seriously crappy editing in the upper-left quadrant of the image. Still, cool stuff.

Horribly formatted article

[Daniel Klugh]

What's with all of the hard line breaks in the original article? I end up with the last word (or so) of every sentence on a line by itself. They put a <BR> at the end of every physical line of the source HTML.