04/02/2020
IC 1101 is a giant elliptical galaxy 1.04 billion light years away from Earth, visible in the constellation Virgo.
IC 1101 is one of the largest known galaxies in the Universe: in fact, it has a diameter of 2 million light years, although some estimates suggest it may even be 6 million light years. For comparison, the diameter of the Milky Way is 100 thousand light years.
IC 1101 contains about 100 trillion stars: our galaxy for comparison hosts "just" 100 billion stars.
At the center of IC 1101 there is a black hole, one of the most massive in the entire universe, with a mass of about 50 billion solar masses.
Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, BOS.