The Loneliest Galaxy In The Universe
“Would we have stopped looking? Would we have concluded that we were the only galaxy in the Universe, and never have discovered things like the expanding Universe, the Big Bang, and dark matter, which all require other galaxies to reveal themselves to us? How fortunate we are, around the darkest time of the year, that the entire Universe made it easy for us to discover it. How unfortunate must an inhabitant of this distant, lonely galaxy be, that the Universe itself seems to be conspiring to hide itself.
And it makes you wonder, just a little bit, in what ways is our galaxy and our position in the Universe unusual, and what incorrect assumptions are we making because we only have one point-of-view to call our own?”
When Einstein put forth his space-and-time changing theory of General Relativity, one of the consequences he didn’t anticipate – and, in fact, resisted – was the fact that a static Universe would be unstable, and that the Universe must be either expanding or contracting. While the theoretical work of many, such as de Sitter, Friedmann and Lemaître, pointed towards this conclusion, it was the observational work of Hubble in the 1920s that sealed the deal. By observing the distances and recessional velocities of a great many galaxies, he was able to not only show that the Universe was expanding, but he measured the expansion rate. Yet not every galaxy is as favorably situated as our own; while we have hundreds of thousands of galaxies within a few hundred million light years, some galaxies have none. In fact, if we were situated at the same location as MCG+01-02-015, we wouldn’t have discovered a single galaxy beyond our own until the 1960s.
Would we have given up, and failed to discover not only the expanding Universe, but the Big Bang and dark matter as well? Find out about this unusual void galaxy, and be thankful for our abundant location in the Universe!