Galaxies in Pictures

       Galaxies in Pictures

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.

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.

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.

Tadpole Galaxy

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.

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.

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. 

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.