Fact Sheet
Red Giant Planet
Bright galaxies dot the sky of a planet orbiting a red-giant star traveling between the galaxies of the Virgo Cluster. Hubble Space Telescope recently saw several hundred bright red-giant stars between the galaxies of the Virgo Cluster, a family of about 2,500 galaxies 60 million light-years from Earth. Based on these observations, astronomers say that as many as one trillion stars inhabit the space between the cluster’s galaxies -- several times the number of stars in the Milky Way. These stars are so far from each other that skywatchers on a planet like the one depicted in this artist’s conception probably could not see even one other star. Instead, their sky would be filled with galaxies.
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