Okay, I like it, Picasso! 🖼
This cosmic portrait—captured with the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3–shows a stunning view of a spiral galaxy, which lies approximately 60 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices. This constellation – whose name translates as Bernice’s Hair – was named after an Egyptian queen who lived more than 2,200 years ago.
As majestic as spiral galaxies like this are, they are far from the largest structures known to astronomers. In fact, this spiral galaxy is part of the Virgo cluster, which contains more than a thousand galaxies. This cluster is in turn part of the larger Virgo supercluster, which also encompasses the Local Group containing our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
This image comes from a large program of observations designed to produce a treasure trove of combined observations from two great observatories: NASAHubble and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). ALMA is a vast telescope consisting o...
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