Loner galaxies like the Milky Way are a bit unusual. We live out in the suburbs of space, but most galaxies prefer the hustle and bustle of the urban environment: the galaxy cluster. Clusters can have dozens of galaxies, but some are huge and have thousands of island universes swarming around inside them. We're loosely affiliated with a cluster about 60 million light years away, the Virgo Cluster, but it's only a middlin'-sized town. The Coma Cluster is a metropolis.
Coma is about 300 million light years away or so, and has well over 1000 galaxies. It's far enough away that you need a decent telescope to see even the brightest members, but when you point something like Hubble at it
, well, you get the picture above, which was just released (the European version can be found here
). That picture is only a section of the cluster, but ...
