With the right hyper-technology, you adjust the Dyson Sphere concept into a Dyson three-ring binder derivative that could then hold huuuuuge space women...

TlalocW

than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth.

That line from Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" always astounded and stuck with me. Images like this bring it back to mind. Barely fathomable.

Why are they flat? Everything else is in globe form. These galaxies have been flattened by something, right?

but they're formed by physics, so centrifugal force causes many pinwheel shapes depending on how they were formed and how old they are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_morphological_classification

Another favorite piece I recall from "Cosmos" was an explanation of galaxy population in the universe, and how one galaxy can pass right through another. If we could shrink our sun down to the size of a grapefruit, the nearest star would be 400 miles away. If we shrink our Milky Way down to the size of a grapefruit, the nearest galaxy would be ten feet away.

Ever thing we see in the night sky is within in our own galaxy. The Milky Way that streaks across the heavens is an edge-on view of the spiral arms.

The Hubble made an astounding discovery when it trained it's lens in a small area of space and took a time exposure. What it saw is known as the Hubble Deep Field Image. It showed that galaxies are much more densely populated than we ever thought. These are almost all galaxies, each containing millions of billions of stars:

Very likely a massive black hole. The 'something' is gravity; the black hole at the center pulls everything in and creates the spin (and thus the spiral), much like a figure skater pulling their arms in. Our own galaxy has a black hole at the center, and probably holds much stranger things yet to be theorized.

The fuzzier globes may be globular clusters- large formations consisting of thousands of stars. Some of them may be other brilliant objects near or far; without close study of each, we don't know what's pictured here. Some of the very bright objects that appear close in the photo may in fact be very bright galaxies thousands of light-years away.

We are less than specks, yet all of us are stardust.