![]() ![]() Brilliant young clusters of sizzling newborn blue stars trace out the spiral arms. These nebulae are areas of intense star formation within molecular hydrogen clouds. The Pinwheel's spiral arms are sprinkled with large regions of star-forming nebulae. Hubble's high resolution reveals millions of the galaxy's individual stars in this image. Approximately 100 billion of these stars alone might be like our Sun in terms of temperature and lifetime. The galaxy is estimated to contain at least one trillion stars. The giant spiral disk of stars, dust and gas is 170,000 light-years across or nearly twice the diameter of our Milky Way. ![]() Kuntz (Johns Hopkins University and NASA) recently catalogued nearly 3000 previously undetected star clusters in it. As an example of the many treasures hiding in this immense image, a group led by K.D. The Hubble observations that went into assembling this image composite were retrieved from the Hubble archive and were originally acquired for a range of Hubble projects: determining the expansion rate of the universe studying the formation of star clusters in giant starbirth regions finding the stars responsible for intense X-ray emission and discovering blue supergiant stars. The final composite image measures a whopping 16,000 by 12,000 pixels. The galaxy's portrait is actually composed from 51 individual Hubble exposures, in addition to elements from images from ground-based photos. It is the largest and most detailed photo of a spiral galaxy beyond the Milky Way that has ever been publicly released from Hubble. Neither was this Hubble Space Telescope image of the face-on spiral galaxy Messier 101 (the Pinwheel Galaxy). Giant galaxies weren't assembled in a day. The image is the largest and most detailed photo of a spiral galaxy ever released from Hubble. This new Hubble image reveals the gigantic Pinwheel galaxy, one of the best known examples of "grand design spirals", and its supergiant star-forming regions in unprecedented detail. ![]()
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