Discovered by William Herschel in 1783, NGC 3274 is a magnitude +12.8 galaxy located over 20 million light-years away in the constellation of Leo bordering on Leo Minor. The galaxy PGC 213714 is also visible on the upper right of the frame, located some 1.3 billion light-years from Earth. Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Calzetti.This image of the spiral galaxy NGC 3274 comes courtesy of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Hubble’s WFC3 vision spreads from the ultraviolet light through to the near infrared, allowing astronomers to study a wide range of targets, from nearby star formation through to galaxies in the most remote regions of the cosmos.
This particular image combines observations gathered in five different filters, bringing together ultraviolet, visible, and infrared light to show off NGC 3274 in all its glory. As with all of the data Hubble sends back to Earth, it takes advantage of the telescope’s location in space above our planet’s distorting atmosphere. WFC3 returns clear, crisp, and detailed images time after time.
NGC 3274 is a relatively faint galaxy located over 20 million light-years away in the constellation of Leo (The Lion). The galaxy was discovered by William Herschel in 1783. The galaxy PGC 213714 is also visible on the upper right of the frame, located much further away from Earth.
A near-record 17-billion-solar-mass black hole discovered in a sparse area of the local universe indicates that these monster objects may be more common than once thought. The newly discovered supermassive black hole is in NGC 1600, an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Eridanus some 149 million light-years away.
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a stellar nursery known as N159 — a maelstrom of glowing gas and dark dust within one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). N159 is located over 160,000 light-years away. It resides just south of the Tarantula Nebula, another massive star-forming complex within the LMC.
ESO’s Very Large Telescope has captured a magnificent face-on view of the barred spiral galaxy Messier 77. The image does justice to the galaxy’s beauty, showcasing its glittering arms criss-crossed with dust lanes — but it fails to betray Messier 77’s turbulent nature.
