Rubin’s Galaxy

In this Hubble Space Telescope image UGC 2885, Rubin’s Galaxy, a giant spiral galaxy about 232 million light-years distant, has about 10 times as many stars as the Milky Way.

Rubin’s Galaxy, expands some 800,000 light-years across compared to the Milky Way’s diameter of 100,000 light-years or so, it has around 1 trillion stars.

The bright, spiky stars ling in the foreground toward the heroic northern constellation Perseus and well within our own Milky Way galaxy.

Part of an investigation to understand how galaxies can grow to such enormous sizes, UGC 2885 was also part of An Interesting Voyage and astronomer Vera Rubin’s pioneering study of the rotation of spiral galaxies. Her work was the first to convincingly demonstrate the dominating presence of dark matter in our universe.

Credit NASA, ESA, B. Holwerda (University of Louisville)

source APOD