Prior to the 1920s it was generally thought, with a few exceptions,
that our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire Universe. Based on
the work of Henrietta Leavitt with Cepheid variables, astronomer
Edwin Hubble was able to determine that the Andromeda Galaxy and
others had to lie outside our own. Moreover, based on the work of
Vesto Slipher, involving the redshifts of these galaxies, Hubble
was able to determine that the Universe was not static, as had been
previously thought, but expanding. The number of galaxies has also
been expanding, with estimates varying from 100 billion to 2
trillion. While every galaxy in the Universe is interesting just by
its very fact of being, the author has selected 60 of those that
possess some unusual qualities that make them of some particular
interest. These galaxies have complex evolutionary histories, with
some having supermassive black holes at their core, others are
powerful radio sources, a very few are relatively nearby and even
visible to the naked eye, whereas the light from one recent
discovery has been travelling for the past 13.4 billion years to
show us its infancy, and from a time when the Universe was in its
infancy. And in spite of the vastness of the Universe, some
galaxies are colliding with others, embraced in a graceful
gravitational dance. Indeed, as the Andromeda Galaxy is heading
towards us, a similar fate awaits our Milky Way. When looking at a
modern image of a galaxy, one is in awe at the shear wondrous
nature of such a magnificent creation, with its boundless secrets
that it is keeping from us, its endless possibilities for harboring
alien civilizations, and we remain left with the ultimate knowledge
that we are connected to its glory.
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