When you poke the Pillsbury dough boy in his bulging tummy, he giggles. When you poke the bulge in NGC 4710, however, you get the history of how galaxies form. Voila!
Awesome. And you really need to embiggen this one to get a sense of the incredible beauty and resolution of the picture. Try the 4000 x 2000 pixel one on for size! NGC 4710 is an edge-on spiral galaxy located about 60 million light years away in the Virgo Cluster. That puts it in the next town over, cosmically speaking, so it's a rich target for something like Hubble Space Telescope. This image, newly released (but taken in 2006 before the last servicing mission), reveals spectacular details in the sideways galaxy. Views like this really accentuate the huge sprawling dust complexes littering spiral galaxies. But it isn't the dust astronomers are interested in here. Spirals have three main parts: ...
