“Super spirals are extreme by many measures,” says Patrick Ogle of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Super spirals were discovered as an important new class of galaxies while studying data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) as well as the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED).

Only about 100 super spirals are known to date. The largest span 450,000 light-years compared to the Milky Way’s 100,000-light-year diameter.

In addition to being much more massive than the Milky Way, they’re also brighter and larger in physical size. Super spirals are exceptional in almost every way. These “super spirals,” the largest of which weigh about 20 times more than our Milky Way, spin at a rate of up to 350 miles per second (570 km/sec). New research has found that the most massive spiral galaxies spin faster than expected. When it comes to galaxies, how fast is fast? The Milky Way, an average spiral galaxy, spins at a speed of 130 miles per second (210 km/sec) in our Sun’s neighborhood.

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