A week after the astronomers celebrated NASA's Hubble Space Telescope's 33rd launch anniversary, the space telescope sent a stunning image of a dazzling pair of neighbouring galaxies.
The American space agency has shared the image on its Instagram page with a caption that reads, "Look at those two buddies. Just hanging out. Doing their thing."
"This starry pair offers a glimpse of what our Milky Way galaxy would look like to an outside observer." "The edge-on galaxy is called NGC 4302, and the tilted galaxy is NGC 4298."
The space agency further mentioned that, like twinning pals, both of these galaxies are approximately 55 million light-years away, reside in the constellation Coma Berenices, and were discovered together in 1784 by astronomer William Herschel.
"Although these galaxies look quite dissimilar from one another due to our perspective seeing them from different angles in the sky, they are very similar in structure and contents. Both galaxies are a little basic, as far as galaxies go. Being typical spiral galaxies, they have arms of young stars that wind outward from their centres."
"These bright arms are regions of intense star formation. Like other spiral galaxies, they have central bulges surrounded by a faint halo of stars and bars that extend from their central bulges to the arms," the space agency said.
Describing the image, the Instagram post stated that on the left side, a galaxy is at a 90-degree angle from Earth on its disc. The angle of view creates a thin, slanted line through space like a tear in a canvas, with darker, redder lanes of stars silhouetting its shape. To the right of the image, a large spiral galaxy extends long trails of stars and gas in shades of blue that brighten to yellow towards its galactic centre. The background of the image is the blackness of space, sprinkled with the occasional bright dots of distant stars and galaxies.
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