Hubble’s recent highlight of NGC 4449 places a dwarf irregular galaxy roughly 12.5 million light-years away in Canes Venatici under close scrutiny, and the object’s ragged outline does most of the explanatory work. Scattered blue-white clusters of massive stars sit next to pinkish patches of active formation and dark silhouettes of gas and dust that […]
Photo credit: NASA/Chris GunnNASA’s James Webb Space Telescope turned its near-infrared camera toward a dusty patch of the constellation Cepheus and returned an image of NGC 7129 that lays out several stages of star formation across a single frame. Roughly 3,300 light-years from Earth, the region spans about 5.7 light-years and holds both young stars […]
Hubble’s new frame of NGC 4698 arrives from 55 million light years out in Virgo, a spiral tucked into the nearest big cluster of more than a thousand galaxies bound by gravity. Brown dust lanes cut through the outer disk and young blue stars light the same curves, yet those arms refuse to spiral into […]