Essentially everything we can see in the night sky — whether with the unaided eye or with telescopes — are galaxies, or parts of galaxies. When thinking about galaxies, we need to think BIG: a galaxy is an almost unfathomably large collection of dust, gas, dark matter, planets, and stars — billions of them, packed together by the force of gravity.
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© 2009 Springer Science + Business Media, LLC
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(2009). Galaxies: The Big Picture. In: Christensen, L.L., Shida, R.Y., De Martin, D. (eds) Cosmic Collisions. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-93855-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-93855-4_1
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