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It's a galaxy. It's M31, our neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy. The picture is a mosaic of over seven thousand exposures made by the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA says it contains over 100 million stars. If you click on the image to enlarge it, you can scroll around it to see a lot more, though you won't be able to count 100 million stars.

Credits: NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and L.C. Johnson (University of Washington), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler

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Here we have a spiral galaxy seemingly disguised as a wizard's wand. However we are seeing NGC 1032 edge-on, so we can't see the spiral arms.The galaxy is located a hundred million light years away in the constellation Cetus (the Sea Monster). If you look closely, you can see a number of other galaxies in the background.

NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

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It resembles a peaceful rose swirling in the cosmic darkness of the cosmos, but NGC 3256 is actually the site of a violent clash. This distorted galaxy is the relic of a collision between two spiral galaxies that happened some 500 million years ago. It's still reeling in the aftermath of this event.

Located about 100 million light-years away in the constellation of Vela (The Sails), NGC 3256 is about the same size as our Milky Way. It continues to bear the marks of its tumultuous past in the extended luminous tails that sprawl out around the galaxy, thought to have formed during the initial encounter between the two galaxies. These tails are studded with young blue stars, which were born in the frantic but fertile collision of gas and dust.

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It's NGC 6744 the Milky Way's big sister. It's a beautiful spiral, but much larger than the Milky Way, about double the diameter. Like our Galaxy its prominent central region shows up yellow as it's made up mostly of old yellow stars. But the dusty spiral arms have lots of blue and pink. Clusters of hot young stars show up blue, and regions of active star formation are pink.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA (Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt)

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Hubble image of globular cluster Messier 79 which is 41,000 light years away in the constellation Lepus (the Hare). It contains about 150,000 stars whose mutual gravity pulls them together into a somewhat spherical shape. Clusters like this contain some of the oldest stars in the Galaxy, some nearly 12 billion years old.

Most of the bright blue stars have used up their hydrogen fuel and are fusing helium which releases more energy and makes them hotter. The reddish stars are giants in their final states of life. The yellow stars are similar to the Sun.

Pierre Méchain discovered the cluster in 1780 and reported it to Charles Messier, who included it in his catalog. Several years later, William Herschel with his large telescope resolved the stars in M79, and described it as a “globular star cluster.”

Credit: NASA and ESA
Acknowledgment: S. Djorgovski (Caltech) and F. Ferraro (University of Bologna)

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