Galaxies in Pictures
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| Comet Galaxy |
The Comet Galaxy is a spiral galaxy located 3.2 billion light-years from Earth, in the galaxy cluster Abell 2667, was found with the Hubble
Space Telescope. This galaxy has a little more mass
than our Milky Way. It was detected on 2 March 2007.
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| Whirlpool Galaxy |
The Whirlpool Galaxy (also known as Messier 51a, M51a,
or NGC 5194) is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici. Recently it was estimated to be 23 ± 4 million light-years from the Milky Way Galaxy.
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| Hoag's Object |
Hoag's Object is a non-typical galaxy of the type known as a ring galaxy. The appearance of this object has interested amateur astronomers as
much as its uncommon structure has fascinated professionals. The galaxy is named after Arthur Allen Hoag who discovered it in 1950 and identified it as either a planetary nebula or a peculiar galaxy with eight billion stars.
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| Tadpole Galaxy |
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| Small Magellanic Cloud
The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is a dwarf galaxy. It has a diameter of
about 7,000 light-years and contains several hundred million stars. It has a total
mass of approximately 7 billion times the mass of the Sun.
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The Tadpole Galaxy is a disrupted barred
spiral galaxy located 400 million light years from Earth toward the northern constellation Draco. Its most dramatic features are a trail of stars about 280 thousand
light-years long and massive, bright blue star clusters.
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a nearby irregular galaxy, and a satellite of the Milky Way. At a distance of
slightly less than 50 kiloparsecs (≈160,000 light-years), the LMC is the third
closest galaxy to the Milky Way. |
| The Milky Way |
The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System. This name derives from its appearance as a dim "milky"
glowing band arching across the night sky, in which the naked eye cannot
distinguish individual stars. The Milky Way is a barred
spiral galaxy 100,000–120,000 light-years in diameter containing 200–400 billion stars. It may contain at least as many planets.[17][18] The Solar System is located within the disk, around two thirds of the
way out from the Galactic Center, on the inner edge of a spiral-shaped concentration of gas and dust
called the Orion–Cygnus
Arm.
Messier 82 (also known as NGC 3034, Cigar Galaxy or M82)
is the prototype nearby starburst galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. The starburst galaxy is five times as bright as the whole Milky Way and one hundred times as bright as our galaxy's center. |
| Sombrero Galaxy |
The Sombrero Galaxy (also known as M104 or NGC 4594) is an unbarred
spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo located 28 million light years from Earth. It has a bright nucleus, an unusually large central bulge,
and a prominent dust lane in its inclined disk. The dark dust lane and the bulge give this galaxy
the appearance of a sombrero.
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| Andromeda Galaxy |
The Andromeda Galaxy is a spiral galaxy approximately 2.5 million light-years (2.4×1019 km) from Earth in the Andromeda
constellation. The Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest
spiral galaxy to our Milky Way galaxy, but not the closest
galaxy overall. It gets its name from the area of the sky in which it appears,
the constellation
of Andromeda, which was named after the mythological
princess Andromeda.
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| Sunflower Galaxy |
The Sunflower Galaxy (also known as Messier 63, M63, or NGC 5055) is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici consisting of a central disc surrounded by many short spiral arm
segments. The Sunflower Galaxy is part of the M51 Group, a group of galaxies that also includes the Whirlpool Galaxy.
