This is Messier 96, a spiral galaxy a bit more than 35 million light-years away in the constellation of Leo (The Lion). It is roughly the same mass and size as the Milky Way, but unlike our more or less symmetrical galaxy, M96 is lopsided. Its dust and gas are unevenly spread throughout its weak spiral arms, and its core is not exactly at the apparent galactic center. Its arms are also asymmetrical, perhaps because of the gravitational pull of other galaxies within the same group as Messier 96.
Image Credit: ESA / NASA
Astronomers have assembled one of the most comprehensive portraits yet of the universe’s evolutionary history. It’s based on a broad spectrum of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and other space and ground-based telescopes. In particular, Hubble’s ultraviolet vision has been used to track the birth of stars over the last 11 billion years, going all the way back to the cosmos’ busiest star-forming period about 3 billion years after the big bang. This composite image encompasses a sea of around 15,000 galaxies widely distributed in time and space. About 12,000 of them are undergoing star formation. This mosaic is 14 times the area of the Hubble Ultra Violet Ultra Deep Field released in 2014. Right click on the image to embiggen it.
NGC 6744 is similar to our home galaxy, but it’s about 200,000 light-years in diameter, about twice the size of our galaxy. Like the Milky Way, NGC 6744 has a prominent central core packed with old yellow stars. Its dusty spiral arms glow in shades of pink and blue; while the blue sites are full of young star clusters, the pink ones are regions of active star formation, indicating that the galaxy is still very lively.