ESA

This week’s image looks like something ginned up by AI, but it is from the Hubble Space Telescope. Just the number of stray galaxies in the image is amazing.

Here is the description of the image from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hubble page:

Barred spiral galaxy NGC 5335 observed by the Hubble Space Telescope takes up the majority of the view. At its center is a milky yellow, flattened oval that extends bottom left to top. Within the oval is a bright central region that looks circular, with the very center the brightest. In the bright central region is what looks like a bar, extending from top left to bottom right. Around this is a thick swath of blue stars speckled with white regions. Multiple arms wrap up and around in a counterclockwise direction, becoming fainter the farther out they are. Both the white core and the spiral arms are intertwined with dark streaks of dust. The background of space is black. Thousands of distant galaxies in an array of colors are speckled throughout.

This year marks the 35th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope. It was launched on April 24, 1990 aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. The telescope was expected to have a service life of 35 years, though it is still going strong with various proposals to update the telescope and keep it operating for years to come.

To mark the occasion, NASA put together a video highlighting missions and related images. The celebration will continue throughout the year with new images and other selected items.

Here are a few interesting facts related to the Hubble:

• Hubble is currently located 326 miles (525 km) above Earth’s surface. If you could drive straight up, you could reach it in about the same time it would take you to drive from Baltimore, Maryland to Boston, Massachusetts. 
• Hubble races through its orbit at about 17,000 miles per hour (27,000 kph), completing an orbit about every 95 minutes. That means it sees 15 sunrises every day.
• While Hubble is speeding around Earth, it can lock onto a target without deviating more than 7/1000th of an arcsecond, or about the width of a human hair seen at a distance of one mile.

This week’s image is from the Hubble Space Telescope. It was shared on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Week website last month. The sparkling galaxy, Messier 94, is about 15 million light-years away.

Here is NASA’s description of what you are seeing above:

Beautiful island universe Messier 94 lies a mere 15 million light-years distant in the northern constellation of the hunting dogs, Canes Venatici. A popular target for earth-based astronomers, the face-on spiral galaxy is about 30,000 light-years across, with spiral arms sweeping through the outskirts of its broad disk. But this Hubble Space Telescope field of view spans about 7,000 light-years or so across M94’s central region. The sharp close-up examines the galaxy’s compact, bright nucleus and prominent inner dust lanes, surrounded by a remarkable bluish ring of young, massive stars. The massive stars in the ring appear to be less than about 10 million years old, indicating the galaxy experienced a corresponding well-defined era of rapid star formation. As a result, while the small, bright nucleus is typical of the Seyfert class of active galaxies, M94 is also known as a starburst galaxy. Because M94 is relatively nearby, astronomers can explore in detail reasons for the galaxy’s burst of star formation.

Note: I swapped out the earlier protostar image for this one when I realized I was duplicating an earlier entry.