In this Hubble Space Telescope image
the bright, spiky stars
lie in the foreground toward the heroic northern constellation
Perseus and well within our own Milky Way galaxy.
In sharp focus beyond is
UGC 2885,
a giant spiral galaxy about 232 million light-years distant.
Some 800,000 light-years across compared to the Milky Way's
diameter of 100,000 light-years or so, it has around 1 trillion stars.
That's about 10 times as many stars as the Milky Way.
Part
of an investigation
to understand how galaxies can grow to such enormous sizes,
UGC 2885 was also part of
An Interesting Voyage
and American astronomer Vera Rubin's
pioneering study of the rotation of spiral galaxies.
Her work was the first to convincingly demonstrate
the dominating presence of
dark matter in our
universe.
A
new U.S. coin
has been issured to honor Vera Rubin, while the
Vera C. Rubin Observatory
is scheduled to unveil images from its first look at the
cosmos on June 23.