Daily Telescope: The ambiguously galactic duo


This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features NGC 3783, a bright barred spiral galaxy about 130 million light-years from Earth.
Enlarge / This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features NGC 3783, a bright barred spiral galaxy about 130 million light-years from Earth.

ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. C. Bentz, D. J. V. Rosario

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s April 23, and today’s photo comes from the Hubble Space Telescope. It features a lovely, barred spiral galaxy and a photobombing star on the right-hand side of the image.

The galaxy is NGC 3783, which can be found 130 million light-years away from Earth. Astronomical distances are all mind-boggling, but to try to put things into perspective, that means this galaxy is about 1,000 times the distance farther from us compared to the diameter of our own Milky Way Galaxy. So it’s far, far away.

The star, HD 101274, is much closer. It is located about 1,530 light-years from Earth, which is well within our own galaxy. If you look around the edges of the bright galaxy in the middle of the image, you can see many other spherical and oddball shaped galaxies that are out there, whizzing around the cosmos doing their thing. Whatever that is.

Source: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. C. Bentz, D. J. V. Rosario

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.



Source link

About The Author

Scroll to Top