(click on image to enlarge)
From NASA/ ESA, October 21, 2019: This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope
shows IC 4653, a galaxy just above 80 million light-years from Earth.
That may sound like quite a distance, but it’s not that far on a cosmic
scale. At these kinds of distances, the types and structures of the
objects we see are similar to those in our local area.
This galaxy's whirling arms tells us a story about what’s
happening inside this galaxy. Stars are generally brighter and bluer
when they are younger, so the blue patches mark sites of new star
formation. Studying the structures of other galaxies is a key way to
learn about the structure of our own, given that humans can’t leave the
Milky Way to look back and see what it looks like from the outside. It
helps to compare our observations of our home galaxy with those of
nearby galaxies we can see in their entirety.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Rosario (CEA, Durham University)
