NGC 7331 Close-Up
Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is often touted as an analog to our own Milky Way. About 50 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Pegasus, NGC 7331 was recognized early on as a spiral nebula and is actually one of the brighter galaxies not included in Charles Messier's famous 18th century catalog.
Since the galaxy's disk is inclined to our line-of-sight, long telescopic exposures often result in an image that evokes a strong sense of depth. In this Hubble Space Telescope close-up, the galaxy's magnificent spiral arms feature dark obscuring dust lanes, bright bluish clusters of massive young stars, and the telltale reddish glow of active star forming regions. The bright yellowish central regions harbor populations of older, cooler stars. Like the Milky Way, a supermassive black hole lies at the core of of spiral galaxy NGC 7331.
Image & info via APOD
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Image Credit & License: ESA/Hubble & NASA/D. Milisavljevic (Purdue University)
#space #nasa #universe #galaxies #science
I did a little reading about this galaxy, mainly to discover more about the colors in the photograph (from what I gather it really is very colorful).
ReplyDeleteAs the description here says, it's analogous to our Galaxy in many ways, although unlike ours it's not a barred spiral Galaxy and — and this is the really interesting bit — the central portion of NGC 7331 rotates in the opposite direction to the rest of the galaxy. NGC 7331 is kind of a colorful cosmic fairground ride 🙂