Audio tour Hall «The Earth and the Universe»

Metagalaxy is the largest object in the world, including all known to modern science space objects. The size of it is 15-20 billion light-years.

 The most common hypothesis is that the Big Bang occurred between 15 or 20 billion years ago. According to this hypothesis, the universe arose in time the terrible explosion with special characteristics splashed out some matter which became the fundamental basis for the emergence of space substance.  Galaxies, stars, planets, interstellar substance have been appearing during the next billions of years.

Our Milky Way is a spiral galaxy.  It has the shape of biconvex lens, the thickness of which is 1.5 thousand light years and the diameter is 100 thousand light years. The total mass of the galaxy is 150 billion solar masses. The Magellanic Clouds and the Andromeda Nebula are the galaxies nearest to us and visible to the naked eye.