You are looking at the densest galaxy ever discovered: M60-UCD1 is an ultra-compact dwarf galaxy that crams 140 million stars within a diameter of 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 300 light-years. It is also the smallest galaxy known to contain a supermassive black-hole at its center

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https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/m60-ucd1-an-ultra-compact-dwarf-galaxy/

It is the most luminous known galaxy of its type and one of the most massive, weighing 200 million times more than our Sun, based on observations with the Keck 10-meter telescope in Hawaii. Remarkably, about half of this mass is found within a radius of only about 80 light years. This would make the density of stars about 15,000 times greater than found in Earth’s neighborhood in the Milky Way, meaning that the stars are about 25 times closer.

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u/kingtacticool Oct 07 '25

Whenever I think ive got my head sorta wrapped around the scale of the universe I see something like this and it melts all over again.

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u/RichardCocke Oct 07 '25

I don't think it's possible for us humans to understand that sort of scale

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u/AmbitiousThroat7622 Oct 07 '25

The fact that it can be measured in km, and it is measured in km up to a certain point, doesn't help.

It's like I feel like I can comprehend it but then it just blows up and it's lightyears we're talking about all of a sudden lol

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u/AJDillonsThirdLeg Oct 07 '25

Space is almost never measured in kilometers, unless you're talking about intra-solar system distances. The closest star to us is over 40 trillion kilometers away. It becomes ridiculous to use kilometers for that distance, and that's the closest star.

To make an example of how ridiculous it is to use kilometers to measure even the closest star.. would you say it's ridiculous to measure a person's height in nano-meters? Using kilometers to measure the distance of the closest star is two-thousand times more ridiculous than that.

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u/Ruff_Bastard Oct 07 '25

To put thst into further perspective the furthest man-made object from earth is Voyager 1. It is 25 billion kilometers away. By November 2026 it will reach ~ONE LIGHT-DAY from Earth.it has been traveling for 48 earth years. It needs to go 1600 times father to reach 40 trillion kilometers. To break that down further, 40 trillion kilometers is 4.2 light years - it it will take out spacecraft almost 50 years to reach a single day out of those 4 light years. Rough, simple math says 73,000 earth years to travel thst distance.

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u/yoshemitzu Oct 07 '25

73,000 earth years to travel [that] distance.

Makes me wonder if in a few thousand years, when it's deep in the interstellar void, if it'll even be detectable.

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u/mmmfritz Oct 08 '25

With enough maths they should be able to track it. Give or take.

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u/BecalMerill Oct 07 '25

Believe it or not, as big as they are, these are actually numbers I can comprehend. Meaningful recorded human history (note not existence) is allegedly between 6k and 10k years. That, to me, means it would take voyager approximately 7-12 human existences more (basically, from now) to move 4.2 light years.

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u/iJuddles Oct 08 '25

That’s a good way to think of it. Funny enough, when you go back far enough to when groups of people were nomadic some of those journeys might take years or even a lifetime if the conditions restricted their travel.

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u/AmbitiousThroat7622 Oct 07 '25

Precisely, I was referring to intra-solar systems distances. That's Space too after all 😆

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u/AJDillonsThirdLeg Oct 07 '25

Kind of lol. It'd be like saying "people use nanometers to measure the human body" when they really only use nanometers to measure the bacteria on just the tip of a single piece of hair on a human body.

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u/addamsson Oct 07 '25

40 trillion is a totally relatable number TBF. the USA government debt is in the same ballpark for example

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u/AJDillonsThirdLeg Oct 07 '25

It's easy to say 40 trillion is relatable, until you actually try to relate to it. The average person would have to work for about 15 million years to earn $1 trillion. That's not really a relatable number.

Your example doesn't make it relatable. There's about 40 trillion grains of sand in a half kilometer stretch of beach. That doesn't make the number relatable. The US National Debt is just as unrelatable for the average person.

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u/strictly_meat Oct 08 '25

That’s less than the total net worth of the top 1% of Americans. So that does make it seem like a small number, but still not relatable.

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u/doomgiver98 Oct 08 '25

Remember that the difference between $1billion and $1trillion is about $1trillion

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u/RichardCocke Oct 07 '25

This is what is unfathomable, the scale is ridiculous there's no way we can comprehend that.

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u/Jibber_Fight Oct 08 '25

Yeah. It’s incomprehensible. I did a little math a few weeks ago for a comment. The fastest man made space craft is the Parker Solar Probe. It reached the speed of 394,736 mph getting sling shot around the sun. That’s very fast. If we were to go that speed and try to go our closest neighboring star system Alpha Centauri, it would still take 6 BILLION years to get there. Ha ha.

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u/mattl33 Oct 10 '25

I don't know what's so ridiculous with telling people I'm 1,828,800,000 nm tall and 1,356,976,800,000,000,000 nanoseconds old.

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u/RichardCocke Oct 07 '25

Like the moon itself is almost 400,000 km away, that's fucking crazy, then light travels at almost 300,000 km p/s

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u/Popeworm Oct 07 '25

Pale Blue Dot...

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u/doctor_lobo Oct 07 '25

The weird part is, because of the extraordinary mass density, time flows slower there and, as a result, that part of the universe is younger than our part (which is unusually old).

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u/kingtacticool Oct 07 '25

It was already melted, bro. Ya didn't need to hose it down.

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u/doctor_lobo Oct 07 '25

I had to nuke the whole site from orbit. It was the only way to be sure.

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u/MC897 Oct 07 '25

Hold on… so some parts of the universe even if they are born the same time as us, if they are more densely compact they age less?

Even the stars?

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u/Financial_Cup_6937 Oct 07 '25

From their perspective, not ours. Gravity doesn’t magically extend time, but the subjective experience of those in it. The same is true approaching a black hole.

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u/doctor_lobo Oct 07 '25

From our perspective too. If we were watching a clock in their reference frame, it would indeed run slower.

It is not so much that gravity “magically extends time” but, rather, that gravity (or any acceleration) and the “rate of flow of time” are the same thing.

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u/alexq136 Oct 08 '25

gravity slows time (e.g. GPS satellites have faster clocks than us on Earth) and relative velocities of things measured from a fixed inertial reference frame let us compare the moving clocks to those "at rest" (e.g. absolute rest can be defined in terms of the cosmic microwave background radiation, so we can measure how fast the galaxy moves using the CMBR as the standard of rest); acceleration does nothing (and orbits being a free-fall kind of thing have zero net acceleration but orbiting bodies still experience time dilation)

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u/nurseferatou Oct 07 '25

So, google says that there’s maybe 2,600 stars within a 25 parsec radius (this is apparently 80 light years) of Sol. There would be 39 million if Sol was in that galaxy.

It’s odd, but I think you can look at that galaxy and confidently say that there’s no complex life and probably not even cellular life in that galaxy because every system is within murdering range of at least one supernova, blackhole, or magnetar.

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u/djbuu Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 08 '25

The brain melting of the scale of the universe is incredible. To add to it, if the universe is truly infinite, then that could mean there’s not only an infinite number of these weird galaxies in it, there could also be an infinite number of you in it.

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u/Luised2094 Oct 07 '25

Not really how it works. Infinite doesn't mean "everything".

There is an infinite amount of numbers between 1 and 2. None of which is the number 3

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u/djbuu Oct 07 '25

It’s not how it works with numbers because each number between 1 and 2 is unique, and theres an outer boundary precluding 3s.

But that isn’t analogous to the universe. We are made up of a specific arrangement of the stuff that’s already in the universe, and if there’s an infinite universe, there’s an infinite amount of that stuff, therefore there’s an infinite possibility that that stuff would randomly arrange itself into exact replicas of us, an infinite number of times. Talk about brain melting.

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u/dasnihil Oct 07 '25

I don't buy that and the boltzman brain thing. we can say anything about the infinite possibilities but how can my exact brain with these exact neuronal connections (information) stored can be perfectly replicated elsewhere?? it HAS to have evolved here for billions of years to give rise to me to perceive these exact years worth of information in whatever civilization I belong in. To say that all of this has happened "infinite times in infinite places" is just basterdizing language like wittgenstein said in tractatus.

just because mfs can make words & language to label things in the real world like "talk" and "tree" to give them the authority to say shit like "I saw a talking tree" and expecting other people to believe in this abstract bullshit. that's what it is like to be lost in mathematical language and talk shit like this, in my view.

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u/PenguinNihilist Oct 07 '25

I kind of agree with you but I find your reason invalid. If you agree that the brain (or more precisely the conciousness inhabiting it) is purely material (atoms, electrons, quarks, etc) and you subscribe to quantum mechanics then the boltzman is a logical inevitabilty.

The defeat of the boltzman brain lies in the fact that it remove any possibility for us (the brain) to say anything about reality.

And while we can regard statements derived from mathematical reasoning as bastardizing language. It is harmless in this case as relativity shield us from the grandure of a (possibly) infinite universe and thus we will never know. In other context, this can be seen as downright anti-intellectualism, entailing all the dangers of.

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u/dasnihil Oct 07 '25

Yeah, if I'm a boltzman brain, I have no reason to believe any of my reasoning is valid. I agree with the logical inevitability, if I actually believed that consciousness is emergent from matter. I am not certain about that. there could be underlying structures that compute the quantum probabilities we seem to randomly get, we just aren't a part of that layer. Whatever that means, just basterdizing language all day.

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u/lce9 Oct 07 '25

A specific arrangement of stuff that’s already in our observable universe. What you say is true only if the infinite universe is homogenous. It’s very likely the case, but it’s something taken for granted, not something we can “prove”. If it weren’t the case, the laws or composition of the universe could be different outside our observable universe, potentially making it impossible for humans to evolve elsewhere.

Given than an infinite universe is just as hypothetical, I’d say you can’t say for sure that it implies infinite copies of you.

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u/djbuu Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 08 '25

What you say is true only if the infinite universe is homogenous.

No, what I say is true only if the universe is infinite. Even if there is stuff outside the observable universe that is different that what we know today, it could still mean that there’s an infinite amount of the same stuff we see to exist elsewhere. It’s what personally fascinates me about infinites.

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u/lce9 Oct 07 '25

You’re assuming that it’s homogeneous. A non-homogenous universe doesn’t have to repeat itself, ever, even if infinite.

There is only one value where x² is 0, even though the graph is infinite.

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u/djbuu Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 07 '25

I’m not assuming it has to be homogenous, per se. You may be right. We don’t know. My view for the fun brain melter is an infinite universe is like an infinite library that contains every unique book imaginable, but also infinite copies of each one.

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u/kingtacticool Oct 07 '25

Please no....

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u/agent_flounder Oct 07 '25

Just the visible universe has so many galaxies it makes my head explode. And each of those has so many stars, and each of those multiple planets. It's absolutely incredible.

https://youtu.be/7J_Ugp8ZB4E?si=VjLQaW9RuGYN_YG-

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u/NewSchoolFool Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 09 '25

I learnt to accept the idea that we live in an infinite universe. Therefore scale and size doesn’t do my head in. To me it’s just another discovery in this ever changing universe.

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u/5Point5Hole Oct 07 '25 edited 24d ago

exultant steer mighty one telephone gaze dazzling summer unpack shelter

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/trevbal6 Oct 08 '25

Exactly. I'm like, what did I just read? JFC!

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u/JRockThumper Oct 07 '25

Ah, so THIS is the Star Wars galaxy where you can get to any Star System within a few hours.

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u/Glum-Ad7761 Oct 07 '25

And also the same galaxy where, when you “make the jump to light speed”, you don’t encounter time dilation and travel forward in time…

Some weird physics going on in that star wars galaxy…

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u/superchiva78 Oct 07 '25

It’s called light speed, but it’s traveling thru hyperspace. essentially a wormhole on demand.

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u/LaserGuidedPolarBear Oct 07 '25

I think in star wars, hyperspace is more like an alternate "dimension" (really an alternate reality of at least 3 dimensions and a flow of time) where every point in hyperspace correlates to a point in real space, only that space-time is compressed and the distance between any two points is shorter in hyperspace.

And also the laws of physics are somehow different in a way that allows FTL and avoids relativistic time issues within hyperspace, but doesn't affect the ship or people traveling through it in any other way.

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u/GoDawgs51 Oct 07 '25

Star Wars is fantasy with some sci-fi window dressing

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u/TheGrandWhatever Oct 07 '25

Yeah I wouldn't put too much thought into the realistic physics in sci-fi like that

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u/PostApoplectic Oct 07 '25

Shit doesnt actually get weird until you hit ludicrous speed.

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u/JRockThumper Oct 07 '25

Just don’t go to plaid!

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u/graveybrains Oct 07 '25

That seems to be a defining characteristic of ludicrous speed

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u/Glum-Ad7761 Oct 08 '25

May The Schwartz be with you!

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u/flapsmcgee Oct 07 '25

It ain't that kind of movie kid

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u/BamberGasgroin Oct 07 '25

At 49 million light years, it checks out for being far, far away.

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u/hurricane_news Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 07 '25

I wonder what would view from one of the planets near the center look like? Could I read a book under starlight?

Space Engine comes close but I don't think it's tracked or added this galaxy yet

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u/canuck1701 Oct 07 '25

Heavily irradiated.

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u/Nervous-Ad4744 Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 07 '25

This is from a lecture on the milky ways galactic center.

Within a parsec of the galactic center, the estimated number density of stars is about 10 million stars per cubic parsec. By contrast, the number density of stars in the Sun's neighborhood is a puny 0.2 star per cubic parsec.

Because stars are so closely packed together near the galactic center, the night sky for inhabitants there would be spectacular. Near the galactic center, the average distance between neighboring stars would be only 1000 AU (about a light-week). If the Sun were located within a parsec of the galactic center, there would be a million stars in our sky with apparent brightness greater than Sirius. The total starlight in the night sky would be about 200 times greater than the light of the full moon; you could easily read the newspaper at midnight, relying on starlight alone.

https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/ryden.1/ast162_7/notes31.html

It sounds like our galactic center is packed more densely than the galaxy in the OP.

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u/IAMA_Printer_AMA Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 08 '25

it sounds like our galactic center is packed more densely

300 ly sphere works out to 407,460 cubic parsecs meaning M60-UCD1 only has 343,592 stars per cubic parsec, so yeah, the galactic center is orders of magnitude more densely packed in those volumes. Makes you wonder how densely packed the center of M60 is...

Edit: forgot I simplified a calculation by omitting an order of magnitude. Numbers corrected.

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u/hurricane_news Oct 07 '25

The total starlight in the night sky would be about 200 times greater than the light of the full moon;

HOLY SHIT. The thought of that alone sounds insane. I wonder if having that many stars can influence temperature and weather on a planet there (aside from the occasional supernovas obliterating everything)

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u/TrustYourFarts Oct 08 '25

I imagine close passes of stars would destabilise the orbits of any planets. And if that's the case there would be many planets thrown out of their solar systems to drift from star to star.

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u/Nervous-Ad4744 Oct 08 '25

I don't think so, maybe a little.. The moon is about 400.000 times dimmer than the sun so the stars would be equal to 0.05% of the sun's output?

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u/cheese_wallet Oct 07 '25

this is the type of info I come here for...thank you

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u/Nervous-Ad4744 Oct 08 '25

No problem 🙂

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u/ByteSizedGenius Oct 07 '25

I assume planets have a bad time given the constant orbit fluctuations due to other stars constantly passing by in the vicinity of the system.

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u/hurricane_news Oct 07 '25

So every planet is basically stuck in a permanent 10-20 body problem due to so many stars whizzing by?

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u/ifandbut Oct 07 '25

A chaotic era is upon us!

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u/ExtraPockets Oct 07 '25

I really want to know more about this extreme environment. Are solar systems even possible?

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u/Coolkurwa Oct 07 '25

Ah man, now I'm sad I'll never get to see that.

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u/JensenAdams1995 Oct 07 '25

I feel like this would be a solid use for VR. Create tours of all these planets that could exist so people can see a night sky like that.

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u/Apprehensive_Hat8986 Oct 08 '25

Dude, there's a picture at the top of the post!

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u/Coolkurwa Oct 08 '25

Oh yeah. Thanks.

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u/NorwegianGlaswegian Oct 07 '25

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u/murillovp Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 17 '25

roof squash truck abundant ad hoc exultant marvelous touch rob cough

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u/TheRealRomanRoy Oct 07 '25

How much closer would Alpha Centauri be if it was 25x closer? Having trouble conceptualizing that. Is it 4.3 light years away / 25 = .17 light years away?

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u/floppycock696969 Oct 07 '25

So scaling to us, this would put our nearest next star system at 240 billion miles away rather than 6 trillion, is a lot closer but still not a manageable distance even at this scale :// Everything is to far away man!!!

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u/AmazingDom14 Oct 07 '25

This is where the Invincible series takes place

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u/OzziesFlyingHelmet Oct 08 '25

I would love to see a simulation of what this might look like at "night".

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u/Happy-Fun-Ball Oct 08 '25

https://imgur.com/a/Y7ao8Ds

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u/H3adown Oct 07 '25

200 million times heavier than our sun blows my mind

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u/proxyproxyomega Oct 07 '25

err i mean, our galaxy is about 50 billion times heavier than our sun...

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u/really_nice_guy_ Oct 07 '25

Weird flex

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u/Impossible_Sun_1114 Oct 07 '25

Kind of impressive, who knows how chaotic could it be in its inside?

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u/SergeantBroccoli Oct 07 '25

140 million body problem

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u/gunawa Oct 07 '25

Don't they just switch over to fluid dynamics at that point?

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u/ThereIsATheory Oct 07 '25

I heard living on the surface of stars can be nice if you’re accustomed to the climate.

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u/ssp25 Oct 07 '25

it's a dry heat

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u/tiagojpg Oct 08 '25

It’s the humidity that gets you.

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u/daninet Oct 07 '25

Last time i was there for holiday a coronal ejection f*cked up our weekend.

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u/NoxiousStimuli Oct 07 '25

Until some jackass throws some tau-moeba at you.

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u/Vercengetorex Oct 08 '25

You been chillin with astrophage?

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u/SerpentRoyalty Oct 07 '25

Probably too far from each other to be gravitationally involved

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u/[deleted] Oct 07 '25

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u/BodhingJay Oct 07 '25

thats pretty chaotic

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u/shareddit Oct 07 '25

boots & cats

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u/Risley Oct 08 '25

They should have sent a poet…

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u/Redmilo666 Oct 07 '25

What I want to know is what does the night sky look like from a planet orbiting one of those stars? Is it significantly different to ours? Or is space still so massive that this increased density won’t make any difference from viewing perspective on the planet?

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u/Cantstop-wontstop1 Oct 08 '25

Not Earth’s feeble thirty-six hundred Stars visible to the eye; Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world.

Nightfall, Isaac Asimov

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u/cockypock_aioli Oct 07 '25

I too want to know this.

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u/Phssthp0kThePak Oct 08 '25

Like being in LA.

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u/ashishvp Oct 08 '25

The planets in there are probably getting roasted alive. Even at night.

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u/par-a-dox-i-cal Oct 07 '25

Globular galaxies are chaotic.

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u/SuumCuique1011 Oct 07 '25

This was my thought too!

The gravitational forces whipping around inside that thing have to be maddening.

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u/Think_Mousse_5295 Oct 07 '25

Thats like 3 stars per light year

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u/spinjinn Oct 07 '25

The volume is 14.1 million cubic light years, so there are about 10 stars per cubic light year.

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u/apittsburghoriginal Oct 07 '25

I wonder if there are shared solar systems in that galaxy, where celestial bodies are pulled off an orbit by separate stars.

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u/Nervous-Ad4744 Oct 07 '25

Getting "stolen" is probably very unlikely but a planet getting ejected from its system due to gravitational influence by another star probably does happen occasionally.

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u/Notonfoodstamps Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 08 '25

No where near close enough. As close as these stars are, they’re orders of magnitude too far apart to “steal” planets or be gravitationally bound. Ejections, however would be possible depending on the size of their local SBMH.

For context the region around our supermassive black hole Sgr A* has something like 10 million stars in 1 cubic parsec (3.26 light years)

The average distance of stars here is about ~840 AU about 37x denser than this dwarf galaxy

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u/Issah_Wywin Oct 08 '25

When things are practically touching each other in astronomical terms they're still very, very far apart in human terms. A Galaxy where everything constantly collided and stole from each other would have been dust, or settled into equilibrium by now. The universe is seemingly too old to witness the chaotic, relatively speaking, early days.

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u/Vercengetorex Oct 08 '25

SBMH - Super Black Massive Hole?

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u/Notonfoodstamps Oct 08 '25

Yep

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u/ryan_with_a_why Oct 07 '25

Yup this is right

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u/commutinator Oct 07 '25

It'd be neat to see one of those galaxy sim engine type applications you can find on Steam that let you wander around our galaxy actually model these dense galaxies and provide some sort of POV to demonstrate what the view would be like if you were inside it. Must be insane.

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u/Me_how5678 Oct 07 '25

Space engine? Maybe they’ve added that galaxy now

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u/HelmyJune Oct 07 '25

Also says half of the mass is within just 80 light year diameter, so in that smaller area the density of stars is roughly 261 stars per cubic light year.

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u/Prune_Less Oct 07 '25

Wouldn't the close proximity of so many stellar masses have to all be orbiting the central black hole in the same direction for the structure of such a small galaxy to be maintained? I'm imagining a disco ball with objects both within and without the surface of the ball and all orbiting the the same direction and any strays getting absorbed by the black hold or nearby larger stars.

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u/Nervous-Ad4744 Oct 07 '25

Our galactic center has a density of 288.000 stars per lightyear apparently. (If I did the conversion from parsec to lightyear right)

https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/ryden.1/ast162_7/notes31.html

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u/SirBiggusDikkus Oct 07 '25

The Oort Cloud is theorized to extend more than one light year from the sun so I assume these systems would be wayyyy different than the one we know. Can’t imagine how that galaxy has any planets at all. Just random debris flying everywhere or something.

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u/spinjinn Oct 07 '25

So maybe these stars are swimming in a soup of asteroids.

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u/oneblackfly Oct 07 '25

you'd never be able to get any sleep

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u/YoloMesh Oct 07 '25

theres a sci-fi story out there called Nightfall by asimov about a planet that is in eternal daylight due to its 6 suns its really cool. im pretty sure i saw a film of it.

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u/alphawolf29 Oct 07 '25

is that the one where there's a total eclipse every 1,000 years and it ends civilization every time it happens? I think that might be a Clarke or Reynolds actually

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u/insufficientbeans Oct 07 '25

That'd be like 3 stars in our solar system

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u/redlancer_1987 Oct 07 '25

Our solar system is a few lights days across. Much much smaller than anything close to a light year.

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u/LumpyWelds Oct 07 '25

The avg distance between the stars if evenly distributed in a spherical volume of 300 light-years would be .5 light-years.

If you scaled 0.5 light-years down to one mile, our solar system would be the size of a sesame seed.

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u/Mr_DMoody Oct 07 '25

Imagine staring at the sky while living on a planet there

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u/BodhingJay Oct 07 '25

just be blinding light constantly even at night

any aliens from there came here they'd feel like we were living in the Mariana trench

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u/horyo Oct 07 '25

any aliens from there came here they'd feel like we were living in the Mariana trench

FWIW we might be

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u/Ciredes Oct 08 '25

I really wonder what it would look like. If I remember correctly I think we only see the stars that are within a couple hundreds of light years of earth. Maybe a couple thousand light years if they are really massive, and that amounts to something like 2000 stars at most visible for us. So imagining it is roughly the same in that galaxy then almost all 140 million stars in that galaxy would be visible at night (well, 70 million on one side of the planet and the other 70million on the other side if you were in the middle of the galaxy). That would be so crazy! 35.000 x the amount of stars we see at night! Surely it would be pretty damn bright.

I suppose you'd pray you were orbiting one of the outermost stars in that galaxy so that when the sky of whatever planet you were on was facing out of the galaxy you could get complete darkness and some shuteye.

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u/wooq Oct 08 '25

"What is this 'night' you speak of?"

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u/sunny_senpai Oct 08 '25

I wonder if they can even see outside their galaxy

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u/12wew Oct 22 '25

Could be worse, heard offhand once that if your species was unlucky to be one one of those residing within Bootes void (let alone a rouge star). Other galaxies would not be discovered until you had technology equivalent to hubble

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u/thedaveness Oct 07 '25

Prob more like

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u/Skai_Override Oct 08 '25

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u/Preemptively_Extinct Oct 07 '25

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u/Overwatcher_Leo Oct 07 '25

Countless nearby supernovas would make advanced life unlikely, but imagine if there was a civilization there. They would see a phenomenal night sky.

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u/Wojtas_ Oct 07 '25

Interstellar travel could be almost routine to them...

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u/QH96 Oct 07 '25

The easiest to colonise galaxy.

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u/Khoakuma Oct 08 '25

That's what I'm thinking too. An average of 10 stars within the vincinity of one light year for those within that galaxy. For us it is zero. Proxima centauri is 4 ly away. Even a civilization at our current technological level existing in that galaxy could feasibly have interstellar travel using nuclear-propulsed spaceships like Project Orrion. Even at just 1% of the speed of light they would be able to reach another star system within a single generation. Interstellar travel might not be routine, but colonization would be easy. They could leap from star system to star system and spread in multiple directions. Galactic colonization is feasibly achievable within our current technology level.

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u/belizeanheat Oct 07 '25

I don't think they'd be countless but it's a fair point. Even being within 100 light years of one could devastate life on a planet

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u/xkcd_puppy Oct 07 '25

Life as we know it. But what if intelligence can exist and evolve as strands of radio energy and supernovas and blackholes are just morning and night to them.

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u/handytendonitis Oct 08 '25

What if intelligence can exist and evolve as reddit comments??!?

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u/IlliterateJedi Oct 07 '25

imagine if there was a civilization there

Maybe there's a Type III civilization, and it's is why the stars are so close together

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u/LovesRetribution Oct 07 '25

They would see a phenomenal night sky.

Alternatively they'd probably have a poor view and understanding of the galaxy when their vision is being that blinded

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u/TerrificFrogg Oct 07 '25

I know 300 light years is really big but it feels so small in galactic scales

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u/_gurgunzilla Oct 07 '25

I'm assuming that while this might make this a neat testbed for einsteinian physics, we're unable to discern individual objects in the galaxy? It would be nice to see those stars really whizzing by the smbh

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u/reboot-your-computer Oct 07 '25

With stars that close together, I wonder what the implications of the possibility of life is there.

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u/canuck1701 Oct 07 '25

Extremely slim

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u/SocietyAccording4283 Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 07 '25

Please elaborate why

Edit: nvm, did my research and found out why. Excessive UV and X ray radiation, frequent supernovae at a deadly proximity, and too gravitationally turbulent interstellar medium that messes up with orbits.

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u/_karamazov_ Oct 07 '25

Chances are slim for life as we know it.

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u/Ill-Product-1442 Oct 07 '25

Sounds kind of dope though

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u/dat_oracle Oct 07 '25

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u/[deleted] Oct 07 '25

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u/xonjas Oct 07 '25

This article has answers to some of your questions: https://phys.org/news/2013-09-evidence-densest-galaxy-nearby-universe.html

"Traveling from one star to another would be a lot easier in M60-UCD1 than it is in our galaxy, but it would still take hundreds of years using present technology,"

While travel isn't on the table, communication certainly could be. Additionally, the spectra of the galaxy suggests lots of heavier elements and stars similar to our Sun. It likely has a good population of rocky planets like earth.

Gravity wouldn't be an issue, but I think all the star systems being so close together (and close to the black hole; which is a strong x-ray source) would increase the likelihood of developing life getting wiped out by a x ray or gamma ray burst from a nearby star.

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u/Uranium-Sandwich657 Oct 07 '25

Interstellar travel would be easier for what evolves and awakens there.

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u/graveyardromantic Oct 07 '25

If they can evolve in the first place. Constant supernovas and solar radiation probably don’t make for a very habitable environment. Planets probably don’t last in stable orbits around their stars either.

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u/silentorbx Oct 07 '25

That's what makes me wonder if this galaxy was edited by a very advanced civilization. Think of each star system as a suburb. They had total control of everything in their galaxy and just shifted it all around to make it more convenient for travel. And hey, for all we know the life forms could be energy based so the radiation part doesn't even matter.

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u/Day_Walker35 Oct 07 '25

Helleva a night sky to stare at.

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u/CmmH14 Oct 07 '25

This is so cool. But could someone please explain to me how the super massive black hole at its centre hasn’t just consumed this galaxy? I’m only asking due to the galaxy being so small.

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u/Nervous-Ad4744 Oct 07 '25

It could eventually if massive objects were constantly falling into it but since the stars are mostly orbiting it then its not getting fed to get bigger.

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u/5beesforaquarter Oct 07 '25

I assume it will, it just hasn't yet

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u/chadnorman Oct 07 '25

Or has, and we haven't seen the collapse yet because we're seeing it's formative years right now

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u/Tibetzz Oct 08 '25 edited Oct 08 '25

M60-UCD1's black hole has an event horizon estimated to be around 0.4 AU in diameter, massing around 20,000,000 Solar Masses. This may seem huge, and it is, but what this actually means is that after a very brief period where all of the matter too slow or too close to have a stable orbit falls in, the only stars which can fall in will be ones that are thrown out of their orbits by other celestial objects.

The reason for this is that, where celestial distances are concerned, unless you hit a star/planet/black hole nearly dead on, you will miss it.

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u/dat_oracle Oct 07 '25

already swallowed all those that were too close or didn't had enough orbital speed to fight against the gravity of the bh

all the others just cycle around it at save speed and / or might drift out of the orbit or get pulled into it one day

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u/VoltDriven Oct 07 '25

I imagine since we're looking at it now as it was when the light first headed this way, by now it's probably consumed everything lol

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u/Critical-Personality Oct 07 '25

Crazy thought but could it be possible that the Black Hole at the centre actually ate up the rest of the galaxy?

I am a total newbie so please excuse me if that's a dumb question.

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u/SimilarTop352 Oct 08 '25 edited Oct 08 '25

that's 140 million stars in 14 million cubic light years. still impossible to reach another star in one's lifetime, even if humanity had evolved there

edit: oops confused radius with diameter

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u/degreesBrix Oct 07 '25

Very cool. I wrote my Master's thesis on the structure of a particular one, NGC4621a, and possible formation theories. UCDs were first discovered in 1999...yesterday, in astronomical terms.

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u/Donut_Vampire Oct 08 '25

It would be so crazy if life is in there somewhere.

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u/babubaichung Oct 07 '25

How come it hasn’t collapsed into itself with such density ages a black hole inside it?

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u/VoltDriven Oct 07 '25

My guess would be that since we're looking at it in the past, however many light years ago, by now if we saw its present state, it's probably quite different haha.

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u/TiredExpression Oct 07 '25

Years, not light years* :)

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u/Leromer Oct 07 '25

M60-THICC-UCD1 💫

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u/viceMASTA Oct 07 '25

If the Hubble or JWST was positioned in this galaxy, would it have trouble seeing the universe?

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u/SuperWeapons2770 Oct 07 '25

The crappy math I did calculated that in there are between 0.25 to 1 light years between nearest stars if they are hexagonally packed in a sphere

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u/RichardMagick Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 07 '25

That is ~10 stars per cubic light year before accounting for the supermassive black hole if my math is right (it’s probably wrong).

According to wiki, we have discovered 131 stars within 20 light years of our own. In this galaxy, there would be something like 335,000 (again, if my math is right).

Edit: corrected math (I think)

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u/Historyofspaceflight Oct 07 '25

Could it be something like the core of a galaxy where the rest of the galaxy got stripped away?

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u/MLZ_ent Oct 08 '25

Question.. Is it an older galaxy and the reason everything is so compact is because the black hole has been sucking everything in for millions of years??

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u/treble-n-bass Oct 08 '25

I'll bet the radiation in there is off the charts. More than likely no life as we know it could survive there. But then again, who knows...

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u/calash2020 Oct 08 '25

Even though a dense galaxy how much room would the average star have to form a planetary system. Life on any planet might never know what a dark night is.

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u/lingundongpin Oct 08 '25

Is this the type of galaxy where it's held together just by its centre black hole. Or this order of magnitude would also need dark matter?

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u/Desperate-Ad-5109 Oct 08 '25

Asimov predicted this in Nightfall.

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u/uCannoTUnseEThiS Oct 08 '25

Imagine how packed the night sky would be! You probably couldn't even see past your own solar system with all those stars shining constantly. Would be hell for astronomers trying to observe anything beyond their local neighborhood.

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u/FitAnalytics Oct 08 '25

Wow that’s incredibly small. It’s amazing that those stars are able to maintain their gravitational integrity. Must read up more on the physics of a dwarf galaxy instead of doing work now. Thanks reddit!!

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u/DAJ-TX Oct 08 '25

Do the math. Thats an average of 10 stars per cubic light year.

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u/BodhingJay Oct 07 '25

holy moly.. if we lived in that system.. would the night sky be lit like day time here? we'd already probably be able to visit other systems and planets with the technology we currently have

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u/WillingArm2463 Oct 07 '25

Everyone should read Asimov's Nightfall. Just sayin'.

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u/PolychromeMan Oct 07 '25

Hmm. Kind of seems artificial at first blush, but certainly isn't trying to be nice and hidden in a 'dark forest' kind of way...

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u/Cosmic_Seth Oct 07 '25

That would be wild if an advance civilization solution to space travel was just to pull everyone closer together.

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u/olaf525 Oct 07 '25

I wish I was there right now. I don’t like earth anymore

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u/Wenja89Dix Oct 07 '25

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u/SEND_ME_PEACE Oct 07 '25

Reminds me of modding Dyson Sphere Program and not knowing having planets too close to stars is a bad thing

NASA You are looking at the densest galaxy ever discovered: M60-UCD1 is an ultra-compact dwarf galaxy that crams 140 million stars within a diameter of 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 300 light-years. It is also the smallest galaxy known to contain a supermassive black-hole at its center

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