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A flying horse on feathered wings - it's the constellation Pegasus. You can spot it by its most noticeable feature, the Great Square of Pegasus, though one star of the square belongs to poor Princess Andromeda. There's also a star in Pegasus very like our Sun with a planet circling it.

Pegasus the Winged Horse

NOTE: This article has been revised and updated.

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Beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 7331 looks to be similar to our Milky Way. It's about 50 million light years away in the constellation Pegasus. In this image you can see dark dust lanes in the spiral arms, the tell-tale bright blue of clusters of massive young stars, and the reddish glow of star-forming regions. In the central region, the stars are yellow, showing they're older and cooler than those in the arms. Lurking in the center is a supermassive black hole, as in the center of our galaxy.

Image Credit & License: ESA/Hubble & NASA/D. Milisavljevic (Purdue University)

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The Sombrero Galaxy (M104) is in the constellation Virgo. But Pegasus has its Little Sombrero Galaxy (NGC 7814). Both sombreros are spiral galaxies seen edge-on, their shapes rather reminiscent of a broad-brimmed Mexican hat. NGC 7814 is about 60,000 light years across, so it isn't exactly little. In fact it's probably about the same size as M104, but looks smaller and fainter because it's farther away.

Image Credit & Copyright: CHART32 Team, Processing - Johannes Schedler

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What's going on in Pegasus? This curious picture shows galaxies colliding in Stephan's Quintet. They are the two spiral galaxies of NGC 7318, their clash created from Hubble images.
Quote
When galaxies crash into each other, many things may happen including gravitational distortion, gas condensing to produce new episodes of star formation, and ultimately the two galaxies combining into one. Since these two galaxies are part of Stephan's Quintet, a final round of battling galaxies will likely occur over the next few billion years with the eventual result of many scattered stars and one large galaxy.

Quite possibly, the remaining galaxy will not be easily identified with any of its initial galactic components. Stephan's Quintet was the first identified galaxy group, lies about 300 million light years away, and is visible through a moderately-sized telescope.


Image Credit: Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA, ESA; Processing & Copyright: Jose Jimenez Priego
Commentary: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)

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A beautiful dusty skyscape in Pegasus with the eye-catching bright star Markab in the upper righthand corner. Markab is one corner of the asterism called the Square of Pegasus. The view is filled with molecular clouds, blue reflection nebulae and distant background galaxies.

Image Credit & Copyright: John Davis

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Stephan's Quintet is a compact group of galaxies in the constellation Pegasus. There are four somewhat distorted yellowish galaxies which are interacting with each other. The blue one is actually much closer than the others. The interacting group is about 300 million light years away, but blue NGC 7320 is only 40 million light years from us.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

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What created the strange spiral structure on the upper left? No one is sure, although it is likely related to a star in a binary star system entering the planetary nebula phase, when its outer atmosphere is ejected. The huge spiral spans about a third of a light year across. The star system that created it is most commonly known as LL Pegasi. The unusual structure itself has been cataloged as IRAS 23166+1655. The featured image was taken in near-infrared light by the Hubble Space Telescope. Why the spiral glows is itself a mystery, with a leading hypothesis being illumination by light reflected from nearby stars.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, HLA; Processing & Copyright: Domingo Pestana & Raul Villaverde
Text: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)

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M15, a dense globular star cluster of over 100,000 stars, is 13 billion years old. It formed in the early years of our Galaxy as one of around 170 globular star clusters in the halo of the Milky Way.

M15 is about 35,000 light years away in the constellation Pegasus. (The spiky stars are much closer, in the foreground.) Although it's about 200 light years across, over half of the stars are densely packed in the central 10 light years. It's one of the densest concentrations of stars known. Hubble-based measurements of the increasing velocities of M15's central stars are evidence that a massive black hole resides at the center of dense globular cluster M15.

Image Credit & Copyright: Bernhard Hubl (CEDIC)
Description: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)


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