The universe is home to an astonishing variety of galaxies, from small dwarf galaxies to colossal spirals. Among the known galaxies, Alcyoneus currently holds the distinction of being the largest known galaxy by physical size.
The early universe is absolutely so far outside our understanding of how the world works it's hard to describe in words. Back then, the cosmos wasn’t filled with stars and galaxies but with a boiling soup of quarks and gluons, with a few microscopic black holes thrown in, occasionally detonating like depth charges. That’s the early universe theorized by a new paper, available in pre-print from arXiv, from researchers at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and MIT anyway.

