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Galaxies may seem lonely, floating alone in the vast, inky blackness of the sparsely populated cosmos \u2014 but looks can be deceiving. The subject of this\u00a0Picture of the Week, NGC 1706, is a good example of this. NGC 1706 is a\u00a0spiral galaxy, about 230 million light-years away, in the constellation of\u00a0Dorado (The Swordfish).<\/p>\n
NGC 1706 is known to belong to something known as a\u00a0galaxy group, which is just as the name suggests \u2014 a group of up to 50 galaxies which are gravitationally bound and hence relatively close to each other. Around half of the galaxies we know of in the Universe belong to some kind of group, making them incredibly common cosmic structures. Our home galaxy, the\u00a0Milky Way, belongs to\u00a0the Local Group, which also contains the\u00a0Andromeda Galaxy, the\u00a0Large\u00a0and\u00a0Small Magellanic Clouds, and the\u00a0Triangulum Galaxy.<\/p>\n
Groups are the smallest of galactic gatherings; others are\u00a0clusters, which can comprise hundreds of thousands of galaxies bound loosely together by gravity, and subsequent\u00a0superclusters, which bring together numerous clusters into a single entity.<\/p>\n