Galaxies. The Universe is littered with them. They have speckled the darkness of intergalactic space, setting it aglow, for 13-billion years. Images like the Hubble Deep Field are impressive yet familiar—showing a vast sea of spiraled disks that appear to stretch into infinity. However, in the far reaches of the cosmos, there are galaxies that are anything by familiar.

To begin with, galaxies are grouped into three size variations: Dwarf galaxies, mid-range spiral galaxies, and gigantic elliptical galaxies.

Dwarf galaxies are among the smallest galaxies that have been classified thus far. They are rather, as the name indicated, rather small. This is “relatively speaking,” of course. They’re still unbelievably large in “human terms.” Many of these galaxies are only about 200 light-years across, and contain only a few tens-of-millions of stars, weighing only slightly more than a star cluster.

Now we approach the largest galaxies – the Ellipticals. They range in shape from nearly spherical to nearly flat, and they can contain as many as a trillion stars. For comparison, the Milky Way is believed to contain a mere 100 billion stars (that’s a lot, but not compared to a trillion).

This brings us to the main point of this article – IC 1101. Shown in these images is IC 1101: The single largest galaxy that has ever been found in the observable universe. It is located almost a billion light-years away.

Just how large is it?  At its largest point, this galaxy extends about 2 million light-years from its core, and it has a mass of about 100-trillion stars. To give you some idea of what this means, the Milky Way is just 100,000 light-years in diameter, and IC 1101 is 2000x as massive. If our galaxy were to be replaced with this super-giant, it would swallow up both Magellanic clouds, the Andromeda galaxy, the Triangulum galaxy, and almost all the space in between. That is simply staggering.

Over billions of years, galaxies the size of our own have collided and combined together to form this immense structure. Telescopic observations have also revealed an interesting fact about the stars within this galaxy. Normally, blue-tinted galaxies signal active star formation, while yellow-red hues indicate a cease in the birth of new stars. IC 1101 is giving birth to very few new stars. Unless it continues to collide and join with other younger galaxies, IC 1101 will eventually fade away.