A spinning beauty

Credit: NASA, ESA/Hub­ble

Mil­lions of stars dance slowly to pro­duce the spin­ning beauty known as IC 391.

Explore this image of the face-on spi­ral galaxy from the NASA/ESA Hub­ble Space Tele­scope. What pat­terns or sto­ries do you see in this image? Leave a note below.

Even though change is slow, galax­ies do evolve. Stars take hun­dreds of thou­sands of years to orbit the tight nucleus of this galaxy. Stars are born and stars die.

Stars of all ages are found in this image. Older yel­low and red stars dom­i­nate the core and color the mid­dle of the spi­ral arms. But at the far reaches of this galaxy, col­ors turn to blue. Blue stars are young and hot hav­ing been recently born from vast clouds of hydro­gen gas. As you explore the image, you can find both giant clus­ters of blue stars as well as a blue mist of new stars. And some­times we wit­ness the ulti­mate end of one of these hot, giant stars as they blow them­selves apart as super­novae. On Jan­u­ary 3, 2001, astronomers in China dis­cov­ered one of these titanic stel­lar explo­sions. For a short time, the energy and light given off by SN 2001B out­shined the entire galaxy.

IC 391 is found about 80 mil­lion light-years from Earth toward the north­ern con­stel­la­tion Camelopardalis, the Giraffe.