Dust on the Edge

ESA/Hubble & NASA

Dust red­dens the starlight along the edge of NGC 891 in this image from the NASA/ESA Hub­ble Space Tele­scope.

Explore this close-up zoom of the spi­ral galaxy seen edge-on. What sto­ries or shapes do you along the edge of the galaxy? Leave a note in the com­ments below.

NGC 891 spans about 100,000 light-years. This view is sim­i­lar in many ways to our view of the Milky Way as it arcs across the night sky. The biggest dif­fer­ence how­ever is that we see our dust-filled plane of our galaxy from the inside from about 10,000 light-years. Using Hubble’s pow­er­ful tele­scope we gaze into NGC 891 from a dis­tance of about 30 mil­lion light-years. The bright galac­tic cen­tral bulge lies just off image at the bot­tom left. Zoom into the ten­drils of dust set against the bright back­drop of the galaxy. Scat­tered through­out these fil­a­ments are areas of blue mist. These are areas of new star for­ma­tion. Astronomers believe too that super­novae explo­sions scat­ter the dust, clear­ing out vast sec­tions of space and push­ing dust into dense pock­ets where more new stars can form.

NGC 891 is found toward the rel­a­tively open con­stel­la­tion of Androm­eda, the myth­i­cal daugh­ter of Cas­siopeia and Cepheus. A few fore­ground stars from the Milky Way galaxy are seen blaz­ing brightly in the image. Look also for dis­tant ellip­ti­cal and spi­ral galax­ies scat­tered through­out the image.

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