A field galaxy is a
galaxy
A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, dark matter, bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar Sys ...
that does not belong to a larger
galaxy group or cluster and hence is
gravitationally alone.
Roughly 80% of all galaxies located within
of the
Milky Way
The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked ey ...
are in groups or clusters of galaxies. Most
low-surface-brightness galaxies are field galaxies.
["An Introduction to Galaxies and Cosmology", ''David J. Adams and others''] The
median Hubble-type of field galaxies is Sb, a type of
spiral galaxy
Spiral galaxies form a class of galaxy originally described by Edwin Hubble in his 1936 work ''The Realm of the Nebulae''[Local Volume
The Local Volume is a collection of more than 500 galaxies located in an area of the observable universe near us, within a spherical region with a radius of 11 megaparsecs from Earth or up to a radial velocity of redshift of z < 0.002 (550 km/s). ...]
, about
Further reading
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References
{{Galaxy
Large-scale structure of the cosmos