Hubble captures a spiral galaxy lying 42 million light-years from Earth

The European Space Agency has shared a new picture wherein the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope spies M99 - a magnificent spiral galaxy which lies roughly 42 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices.

Sharing the image, ESA said M99 is a “grand design” spiral galaxy, so-called because of the well-defined, prominent spiral arms visible in this image.

The picture was captured by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on two separate occasions. The first set of observations aimed to explore a gap between two different varieties of cosmic explosions - novae and supernovae. Caused by the interactions between white dwarfs and larger stars in binary systems, novae are far less bright than the supernovae which mark the catastrophically violent deaths of massive stars.

The second set of observations were part of a large Hubble project aimed at charting the connections between young stars and the clouds of cold gas from which they form.

📷 This NASA/ESA @HUBBLE_space Telescope image shows spiral galaxy M99, known for its well-defined, prominent spiral arms 👉 https://t.co/IH0yetZwX9 pic.twitter.com/JX6juM6x73

— ESA (@esa) May 2, 2022

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international collaboration between NASA and ESA. Launched on 24 April 1990, the space-based observatory has made more than 1.5 million observations of about 50,000 celestial objects and more than 19,000 scientific papers have been published by astronomers using Hubble data.