astralavista

Ever ponder the precariousness of life. Here's an image to stir up your thoughts. Somehow, improbably, life has evolved in the Milky Way, a galaxy similar to
this one captured so beautifully by the Hubble Space Telescope. Here we are, suspended in space, anchored to a dusty island of 100 million stars, which together don't amount to much more but a cosmic comma.

The galaxy in the picture is clumsily called NGC 5866. It floats in space in the constellation Draco, some 44 million light years away. It is some 60,000 light years in diameter, about two-thirds the size of the Milky Way. But it has the same mass, suggesting that it may be much denser.

The Hubble image shows the galaxy, which is tilted nearly edge on to us, as a crisp dust lane. The Hubble team said that the picture "highlights the galaxy's structure: a subtle, reddish bulge surrounding a bright nucleus, a blue disk of stars running parallel to the dust lane, and a transparent outer halo."

The team said that NGC 5866 is a disk galaxy of type "S0" (pronounced s-zero). "Viewed face on, it would look like a smooth, flat disk with little spiral structure," the astronomers said. "It remains in the spiral category because of the flatness of the main disk of stars as opposed to the more spherically rotund (or ellipsoidal) class of galaxies called "ellipticals." Such S0 galaxies, with disks like spirals and large bulges like ellipticals, are called 'lenticular' galaxies."

The Hubble team said this image of NGC 5866 is a combination of blue, green and red observations taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys in February 2006.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)