Daily Telescope: A galactic neighborhood that isn't

Zoom in / Some things in the mirror are closer than they appear.

NASA, ESA, et al. the.

Welcome to Daily Telescope. There is too little darkness in this world and not enough light, too little pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let the other posts provide your daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we'll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe full of stars and wonders.

Good morning. It's January 10, and today's image is from the venerable Hubble Space Telescope. It's an amazing idea.

According to the European Space AgencyThe large, prominent spiral galaxy on the right side of the image is NGC 1356; The two smaller spiral galaxies surrounding it are LEDA 467699 (above it) and LEDA 95415 (very close to its left), respectively; Finally, IC 1947 is located on the left side of the image.

Galaxies appear close together, but looks can be deceiving! For example, NGC 1356 and LEDA 95415 appear to be interacting with each other, but they are approximately 300 million light-years apart.

For comparison purposes, not everyone can do this truly Understand the mind-boggling distances involved in cosmology – our Milky Way Galaxy spans about 100,000 light-years. So, these galaxies are 3,000 times farther away from each other.

Source: ESA/Hubble and NASA, c. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA

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