Super S

Credit: ESA/Hub­ble & NASA

A super “S” traces through sprawl­ing arms of spi­ral galaxy M100 in this image from the NASA/ESA Hub­ble Space Telescope.

Zoom into the swirling dusty lanes, pink neb­u­lae and blue super­giants in this image. Leave a note in the com­ments below telling your sto­ries of this image. The entire starry alpha­bet spelled out with Hub­ble imagery can be found here.

Astronomers con­sider M100 to be a clas­sic exam­ple of a grand design spi­ral galaxy; the ideal spi­ral galaxy. Sim­i­lar to our own Milky Way Galaxy, spi­ral galax­ies have bright cores that are prob­a­bly home to a super­mas­sive black hole. These black holes suck up mate­r­ial. As this gas and dust falls toward the cen­ter, it glows brightly.

As you travel from the bright nucleus out along the dust lanes that make up the spi­ral arms, look for patches of red­dish neb­u­lae. These regions are sim­i­lar to the nearby Orion Neb­ula. Their pink color come from glow­ing hydro­gen gas, per­fect fuel for cre­at­ing new stars. Blue patches within the spi­ral arms are groups of young, hot and mas­sive blue stars. These new stars will prob­a­bly live short lives explod­ing in super­novae after they quickly burn through their hydro­gen fuel. As these stars explode, their shock­waves will push new mate­r­ial together to form new stars. One such bub­ble is found to the right of the nucleus.

M100 is found just 50 mil­lion light-years from Earth toward the dim con­stel­la­tion Coma Berenices, the hair of Queen Berenice from Greek mythol­ogy. The sparkling stars have also been related to the end of the tail of Leo, the Lion.

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