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.
Putting general relativity to the test, astronomers compared the known gravity of a galaxy with the bending of spacetime needed to produce a spectacular ‘Einstein ring’ and found, once again, that Einstein was correct.
Bright, frosty polar caps, and clouds above a vivid, rust-coloured landscape reveal Mars as a dynamic seasonal planet in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope view taken on 12 May 2016, when Mars was 50 million miles from Earth. The image reveals details as small as 20 to 30 miles across. On 30 May, Mars will be the closest it has been to Earth in 11 years.
