Fact Sheet
Edgy Galaxy
NGC 4013, a spiral galaxy, shows how our own Milky Way would look if viewed edge-on. Hubble Space Telescope snapped this image of the galaxy, which is 55 million light-years away in Ursa Major. Dark lanes of cosmic "dust" appear to split the galaxy's disk in two. Bright blue and red blobs of light are stellar "nurseries" filled with hundreds of hot, young stars. The bright star near the center of the disk is a foreground star inside the Milky Way. [Credit: NASA, Hubble Heritage Team]
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