A magestic disk

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hub­ble Her­itage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Col­lab­o­ra­tion; Acknowl­edg­ment: M. Crock­ett and S. Kavi­raj (Oxford Uni­ver­sity, UK), R. OCon­nell (Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia), B. Whit­more (STScI), and the WFC3 Sci­en­tific Over­sight Committee

Dark star lanes and bright yel­low stars make a majes­tic disk of stars in this image of NGC 2841 from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Telescope.

Zoom into the bril­liant core of this spi­ral galaxy. Fol­low the dark dust lanes sil­hou­et­ted against whitish-yellow back­ground stars. As you reach the outer arms notice the much younger, blue stars and star clusters.

Usu­ally, galax­ies are awash in glow­ing pink clouds of hydro­gen gas. Gas and dust come together to form stars. NGC 2841, known as a floc­cu­lent spi­ral galaxy because of its stubby spi­ral arms, is flecked with some pink neb­u­lae but astronomers expect to see more. This galaxy has a low star for­ma­tion rate com­pared to other spi­ral galax­ies. Sci­en­tists the­o­rize that blis­ter­ing radi­a­tion and scorch­ing winds from the super-hot, young blue stars cleared out the glow­ing pink gas clouds and shut off star formation.

NGC 2841 lies about 46 mil­lion light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Ursa Major, the Great Bear. When light left this galaxy, Earth was rel­a­tively ice free, the dinosaurs had van­ished and small mam­mals were begin­ning to roam the land.