Thème :
Galaxies
Description :
(La description de cette image n'existe qu'en anglais) A galaxy on the Edge. Hubble Space Telescope has snapped this remarkable view of a perfectly 'edge-on' galaxy, NGC 4013. This new Hubble picture reveals with equisite detail huge clouds of dust and gas etending along, as well as far above, the galaxy's main disk. NGC 4013 is a spiral galaxy, similar to our own Milky Way, lying some 55 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major. Viewed pole-on, it would look like a nearly circular pinwheel, but NGC 4013 happens to be seen edge-on from our vantage point. Even at 55 million light-years, the galaxy is larger than Hubble's field of view, and the image shows only a little more than half of the object, albeit with unprecedented detail.
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