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Asked by anon-267550 on 12 Nov 2020. This question was also asked by anon-267423.
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Sam Geen answered on 12 Nov 2020:
There are about 100 billion galaxies discovered in the galaxy, which is a bit too many to name. Some of them have names like Milky Way and Andromeda, but some of them are given “catalogue” names and numbers like NGC 1512. And of course we’re finding more as telescopes get better.
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Roan Haggar answered on 12 Nov 2020:
Hi! There are billions of galaxies in our Universe, we don’t know exactly how many, but it’s definitely a huge number. Each of these contains billions of stars, so it’s impossible to really imagine how much stuff there is in the Universe!
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Most galaxies don’t have names, simply because there’s so many that we haven’t had time to name them all yet! But, the galaxies that we have named can get their names in lots of different ways.
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Some galaxies are named after people — for example, the Large Magellanic Cloud (which is one of the closest galaxies to us) is named after Ferdinand Magellan, who was one of the first Europeans to see it. Others are named after things like Greek mythology (such as the Andromeda galaxy), or just named because of how they look (like the Pinwheel galaxy, which has a nice spiral shape).
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However, most galaxies have quite boring names, because we have now discovered so many galaxies that would be very time-consuming to give them all interesting names. For example, one of the most distant galaxies we know of is called MACS0647-JD. These names aren’t very exciting, but are useful for scientists to keep track of the different galaxies we are looking at. Hope this helps! -
ORIANA TREJO ALVAREZ answered on 12 Nov 2020:
Our galaxy the milky was it’s one of about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe.
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