Skip to main content

Messier 66 Close Up


Big, beautiful spiral galaxy Messier 66 lies a mere 35 million light-years away. The gorgeous island universe is about 100 thousand light-years across, similar in size to the Milky Way. This Hubble Space Telescope close-up view spans a region about 30,000 light-years wide around the galactic core. It shows the galaxy's disk dramatically inclined to our line-of-sight. Surrounding its bright core, the likely home of a supermassive black hole, obscuring dust lanes and young, blue star clusters sweep along spiral arms dotted with the tell-tale glow of pinkish star forming regions. Messier 66, also known as NGC 3627, is the brightest of the three galaxies in the gravitationally interacting Leo Triplet.

from NASA https://ift.tt/Sp7RNj6
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is this one galaxy or two? Although it looks like one, the answer is two. One path to this happening is when a small galaxy collides with a larger galaxy and ends up in the center . But in the featured image , something more rare is going on. Here, the central light-colored elliptical galaxy is much closer than the blue and red-colored spiral galaxy that surrounds it. This can happen when near and far galaxies are exactly aligned , causing the gravity of the near galaxy to pull the light from the far galaxy around it in an effect called gravitational lensing . The featured galaxy double was taken by the Webb Space Telescope and shows a complete Einstein ring , with great detail visible for both galaxies. Galaxy lenses like this can reveal new information about the mass distribution of the foreground lens and the light distribution of the background source. from NASA https://ift.tt/ogewjZW
Post a Comment
Read more

The Pencil Nebula Supernova Shock Wave

This supernova shock wave plows through interstellar space at over 500,000 kilometers per hour. Near the middle and moving up in this sharply detailed color composite , thin, bright, braided filaments are actually long ripples in a cosmic sheet of glowing gas seen almost edge-on. Cataloged as NGC 2736 , its elongated appearance suggests its popular name, the Pencil Nebula . The Pencil Nebula is about 5 light-years long and 800 light-years away, but represents only a small part of the Vela supernova remnant . The Vela remnant itself is around 100 light-years in diameter, the expanding debris cloud of a star that was seen to explode about 11,000 years ago. Initially, the shock wave was moving at millions of kilometers per hour but has slowed considerably, sweeping up surrounding interstellar material. In the featured narrow-band, wide field image , red and blue colors track, primarily, the characteristic glows of ionized hydrogen and oxygen atoms , respectively. from NASA https...
Post a Comment
Read more

Southern Moonscape

The Moon's south pole is toward the top left of this detailed telescopic moonscape . Captured on August 23, it looks across the rugged southern lunar highlands. The view's foreshortened perspective heightens the impression of a dense field of craters and makes the craters themselves appear more oval shaped close to the lunar limb. Prominent near center is 114 kilometer diameter crater Moretus. Moretus is young for a large lunar crater and features terraced inner walls and a 2.1 kilometer high, central peak, similar in appearance to the more northerly young crater Tycho . Mountains visible along the lunar limb at the top can rise about 6 kilometers or so above the surrounding terrain. Close to the lunar south pole, permanently shadowed crater floors with expected reservoirs of water-ice have made the rugged south polar region of the Moon a popular target for exploration . from NASA https://ift.tt/0P5sQ6S
Post a Comment
Read more