Posted on 04/07/2021 5:39:13 PM PDT by MtnClimber
Explanation: Found in far southern skies, deep within the boundaries of the constellation Dorado, NGC 1947 is some 40 million light-years away. In silhouette against starlight, obscuring lanes of cosmic dust thread across the peculiar galaxy's bright central regions. Unlike the rotation of stars, gas, and dust tracing the arms of spiral galaxies, the motions of dust and gas don't follow the motions of stars in NGC 1947 though. Their more complicated disconnected motion suggest this galaxy's visible threads of dust and gas may have come from a donor galaxy, accreted by NGC 1947 during the last 3 billion years or so of the peculiar galaxy's evolution. With spiky foreground Milky Way stars and even more distant background galaxies scattered through the frame, this sharp Hubble image spans about 25,000 light-years near the center of NGC 1947.
For more detail go to the link and click on the image for a high definition image. You can then move the magnifying glass cursor then click to zoom in and click again to zoom out. When zoomed in you can scan by moving the side bars on the bottom and right side of the image.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
~Shakespeare ... Hamlet speaking to Horatio
Amazing when you think each pixel in that galaxy is probably a million times the diameter of our entire solar system.
It is amazing. It is amazing how large a galaxy is and even more amazing how many galaxies there are.
One or two trillion in just the observable universe, which may only be a tiny fraction of the total universe. I read in one of Brian Greene’s books that if inflation theory is correct, the universe must be at least 10^20 times the radius of the visible horizon. And since volume increases with the cube of the radius, that’s how many galaxies? Answer: unimaginable.
And the Milky Way galaxy is estimated to have 100 billion to 400 billion stars. Just think how many stars and planets are in the universe!
ok, this one looks like a face sticking out of the center of the top large portion.
very heavy row of eyebrows, can see nostrils and a frown for a mouth.
OR
Maybe I have just been up way too long since I last slept.
thanks for posting these, I look at many and it’s always amazing to see what God has going on in space.
Yep. Not just the number of stars but the distances between them is what I find incomprehensible. And therefore the size of the universe. If the sun were shrunk to a marble, 1 cm across, then the nearest star would be another marble 180 miles way. And it’s only the closest of 400 billion other ones in our galaxy. And there are another 1 or 2 trillion galaxies beyond that which we can see. How many ways are there to explain how unimaginably gigantic the universe is? I keep trying, but there’s no way to really understand it.
That’s a lot of hydrogen atoms!
Don’t forget the helium!!
Well, yeah. That’s why everything floats and aliens talk funny!
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