Thirty exposures captured over nine hours by the Hubble Space Telescope provide a remarkably detailed look at NGC 5643, a face-on spiral galaxy some 60 million light years from Earth in the constellation Lupus. The galaxy has hosted at least two recent Type 1a supernovae, triggered when a white dwarf sucks away enough material from a companion star to trigger a thermonuclear explosion. NGC 5643 features an active galactic nucleus with a million-solar-mass supermassive black hole.
