The giant spiral disk of stars, dust and gas is 170,000 light-years across or nearly twice the diameter of our Milky Way. The galaxy is estimated to contain at least one trillion stars. Approximately 100 billion of these stars alone might be like our Sun in terms of temperature and lifetime. Hubble's high resolution reveals millions of the galaxy's individual stars in this image...

...The Pinwheel Galaxy lies in the northern circumpolar constellation, Ursa Major (The Great Bear) at a distance of 25 million light-years from Earth. We are seeing the galaxy from Earth today as it was at the beginning of Earth's Miocene Period when mammals flourished and the Mastodon first appeared on Earth. The galaxy fills an area on the sky of one-fifth the area of the full moon. - link

I should change the blurb of this blog to 'Excruciatingly Beautiful Large Things'...

Wow...

Via Science Blog!
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