While eventually membership in the Local Group was ruled out, Maffei 1 is now recognized as being the nearest major elliptical galaxy.

These stars form a massive group approximately 300,000 light years away from the nearest galaxy.

Thus no major intrusion into the Cluster could escape detection; the Net would report it long before the light reached the nearest galaxy.

And if you could collapse the Milky Way into that cup, the nearest sizable galaxy, Andromeda, would drift in space about seven feet away.

M31 plays an important role in galactic studies, since it is the nearest spiral galaxy (although not the nearest galaxy).

Andromeda, the nearest galaxy to our Milky Way, is about two million light-years from earth.

Despite these advances, astronomers, limited by the Earth's atmosphere, could only measure the distances to the nearest galaxies.

Therefore an alternative to examining the nearest stars of the same spectral type as the sun is to examine the nearest galaxies.

"And the nearest galaxy to this one is about seven million light-years."

The next nearest galaxy is two and a quarter million light-years away.