NASA says that galaxies were formed billions of years before the Big Bang, after the period of ionization, and even though some studies show otherwise, ours is one of the youngest in the universe. The Milky Way looks small compared to a discovery astronomers just made while scanning the skies with radio telescopes. The newly found galaxy isn’t bright or explosive, yet it stunned researchers by stretching across a span 140 times larger than our own — forcing a rethink of what galaxies are capable of becoming.
A giant next to the Milky Way: It’s not Andromeda
Roughly three billion light-years from Earth, this galaxy extends 16.3 million light-years across, dwarfing the Milky Way’s modest 106,000 light-year diameter. NASA stated that the scale alone makes it one of the most striking cosmic finds in recent memory. Meanwhile, other factors contribute to why this galaxy is bigger than anything we’ve seen before.
NASA spotted the galaxy using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a web of more than 20,000 radio antennas spread across Europe. What set it apart were the massive radio lobes it emits, the classic marker of giant radio galaxies. These lobes are formed from central activity and flare far past the galaxy’s visible boundaries.
NASA reveals the reason why it’s so big: a Giant body at the center
At the center of this massive system sits a supermassive black hole, the engine behind its radio signature. During its active stage, the black hole feeds on gas and dust swirling around it, while some of that material gets redirected and blasted out as plasma jets near the speed of light. These streams then inflate into enormous radio lobes that mark the galaxy’s presence. While lobes like these are common in radio galaxies, the sheer size of this one sets it apart.
The real mystery lies in how a galaxy could reach such extremes in the first place. Galaxies like the Milky Way typically expand by pulling in material from their surroundings, which fuels star formation and structural growth, according to NASA. Yet the vast size of this discovery challenges those standard growth models.
Scientists are not sure about its growth: It’s not like any other galaxy studied before
Researchers at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands suggest that either the host galaxy itself has unusual traits that fuel such expansion, or that the surrounding cosmic environment is particularly favorable to the growth of radio giants. If galaxies of this type need special conditions to form, then the largest of them would almost certainly display those factors.
At the heart of the system, the central black hole is estimated to weigh around 400 million times the mass of the Sun. NASA thinks this kind of scale further highlights how extreme this galaxy is compared to familiar systems like our own. The Milky Way also has its own supermassive black hole in the “center” of our galaxy. The Sagittarius A has 23.5 million kilometers (14.6 million miles). Its mass is about 4 million times the size of our sun – and has been signaling Earth for a while now.
What this discovery means for the future: Does NASA need new guidelines?
Finding a galaxy of this magnitude opens the door to new questions about how such immense structures emerge and evolve. Astronomers are now wondering whether even larger ones might be hidden across the cosmos, and how quickly such giants can grow compared to more conventional galaxies.
The ongoing studies not only aim to solve the mystery of this galaxy’s expansion but also to reveal more about how supermassive black holes influence the growth of their host systems. In the process, these insights could reshape how we understand our own Milky Way, and why our trajectory is changing