Fact Sheet
Sweeping Beauty
Graceful spiral arms sweep around a bar of stars in NGC 1365, a spiral galaxy about 60 million light-years away. The stars in the bar are old, so they produce a yellow-orange glow. Dark streaks across the bar are produced by lanes of dust, which absorb light from the stars behind them. The spiral arms contain young, vigorous stars, so they look blue. Stellar "nurseries," where new stars are being born, form small red or pink knots in the spiral arms. [European Southern Observatory]
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