Hubble images the spectacular core of distant spiral galaxy

There's few images from space more iconic than the spiral galaxy, and Hubble recently captured this amazing specimen.

Have you seen the amazing view of our distant universe that Hubble scientists recently revealed? It contained some 265,000 galazies, of all types, going back nearly 13 billion years.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been essential for peering into the distant reaches of time and space, but point this incredible piece of technology at one specific target, and it can treat us to spectacular views such as the one below.

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Hubble-Spiral-Galaxy

An immense spiral galaxy located about 30 million light-years away from Earth, in the constellation of Leo. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Ho et al.

This is NGC 2903, a barred spiral galaxy roughly the same size as our own Milky Way Galaxy.

This new Hubble image focuses in on this galaxy's core and central portions of its spiral arms. Astronomers can use these views to study the clusters of stars and dust, to learn more about galaxy structure and formation, and possibly even explore the effects of dark matter.

The image below, shot with the 32 inch Schulman telescope, at the Mount Lemmon Observatory, on Mt. Lemmon in southeastern Arizona, gives a bit more of a wide view of NGC 2903, showing off the stretch of its arms through space.

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NGC 2903 spiral galaxy

NGC 2903 from the Mount Lemmon Obseravtory. Credit: Jschulman555/Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Source: NASA

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