This composite image of NGC 1300, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), and the Very Large Telescope’s Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument, shows compass arrows and labels for reference.
The north and east compass arrows show the orientation of the image on the sky. Note that the relationship between north and east on the sky (as seen from below) is flipped relative to direction arrows on a map of the ground (as seen from above).
The scale bar is labeled in light-years, which is the distance that light travels in one Earth-year. (It takes 18,400 years for light to travel a distance equal to the length of the bar.) One light-year is equal to about 5.88 trillion miles or 9.46 trillion kilometers. The field of view shown in this image is approximately 59,000 light-years across.
This composite image shows visible, near-infrared, and radio wavelengths of light that have been translated into visible-light colors.
Read a description of the image.
Credits
Science
NASA, ESA, ESO-Chile, ALMA, NAOJ, NRAO
