This sparkling spiral galaxy looks almost stretched across the sky in this new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Known as NGC 4100, the galaxy boasts a neat spiral structure and swirling arms speckled with the bright blue hue of newly formed stars.
Like so many of the stunning images of galaxies we enjoy today, this image was captured by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). This remarkable instrument was installed in 2002, and, with some servicing over the years by intrepid astronauts, is still going strong. You can access many of the stunning images captured by the ACS here, featuring objects from out-of-this-world spiral galaxies (seen in the picture below) to dark, imposing nebulae, bizarre cosmic phenomena, and sparkling clusters made up of thousands upon thousands of stars.
This sharpest-ever image, taken in January 2005 with the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, illustrates a spiral galaxy’s grand design, from its curving spiral arms, where young stars reside, to its yellowish central core, a home of older stars. The galaxy is nicknamed the Whirlpool because of its swirling structure.
Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI), and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
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5 Comments
Your computer screen is composed of about 1 million pixels. Each one was painstakingly chosen- color, hue, brightness, part of a box, part of a font that was this height set this distance apart horizontally and this distance apart vertically. Clicking in this area produces this action, etc. Each decision made by a human. And this is displayed on a machine which probably has BILLIONS of man hours of knowledge, from mining, identifying, segragating the materials to refining, combining, smelting, forming.
Yet somehow people can believe the universe just came into being on a lark. That 15 Billion years ago, a monumentally gargantuan unfathomable amount of energy in the form of light occurred, and in that instant the shape, size, composition of the universe was created.
Literally NOBODY is saying the Universe,as we know it today, just popped into existence on a “lark.” Though God does have a great sense of humor, there is nothing funny or whimsical about the theory.it didn’t all just appear at once, at least rhat isnt what the theory posits. Even if the big bang did occur, in which a spontaneous imbalance between matter and anti-matter occurred, it still begs to question, where did the framework come from? How is it rhat we have these mathematical constants that set the boundaries of how we perceive the Universe to operate and evolve?
Our “big bang” is likely no different than Democritus’s atom. Correct, but extremely simple relative to the truth behind it. It’s very likely that the truth of the origin of the galaxy, and of reality in total, is so novel as to be beyond the comprehension of anyone who has ever lived, and will remain so for a very long time. The best we can do is speculate with the relatively primitive understanding we possess, or ascribe it to folklore and superstitions as our ancestor did.
Check out the presumptuous humans in the comments who believe it is somehow knowable how the universe could come into being because they can understand how much work it took to create a 720p display.
That might work on the ignorant or afraid my friends, but the rest of us know you just fear your own death and will do, think, and say anything to promote any narrative that says otherwise.
Can we just look at the nice galaxy please without all this?
All I’m saying is that we need a new constellation to be identified, one which illustrates a coronavirus mask. I’m sure that among the dozens of known stars in the universe, there are a few lined up in a ‘rectangle with two loops’ configuration.