(click on image to enlarge)
From NASA/ ESA, July 11, 2019: The shape and structure of this Spiral galaxy are plainly visible thanks to this perspective. Galaxy NGC 3147 galaxy is relatively close by, at a distance of roughly 130 million light-years, and can be found in the constellation of Draco (The Dragon).
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et al.
(To fully appreciate this, at 130 million light-years from Earth, the picture represents this galaxy as it appeared 130 million years ago, in the Mesozoic Era, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.)
3 comments:
Thanks for the wonderful photo, but be aware that you also broke my brain with that last bit.
donnah -- you're welcome (and the brain has remarkable healing powers!)!
The size of the universe can indeed be difficult to grasp. The use of the light-year as a unit of distance does help, though.
It takes a quarter of a second for light to travel from the Moon to Earth. But when the light you're seeing in this photograph left NGC 3147, the Tyrannosaurus rex did not yet exist. By the time the T-rex evolved, the light we're now seeing from NGC 3147 had already been traveling toward Earth for almost fifty million years. And it still had to travel through space for another eighty million years to get here and be collected by a telescope to form this image.
And as galaxies go, this one is "relatively close by"!
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