NGC 6744 - New Image Of The Milky Way's 'Twin'
Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - 11:31
in Astronomy & Space
The MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope has captured an image of NGC 6744, a spiral galaxy about 30 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Pavo (The Peacock). And in the image,NGC 6744 looks a lot like our Milky Way.We see NGC 6744 almost face on, meaning we get a bird’s eye view of the galaxy’s structure. If we had the technology to escape the Milky Way and could look down on it from intergalactic space, this view is close to the one we would see, striking spiral arms wrapping around a dense, elongated nucleus and a dusty disc. There is even a distorted companion galaxy — NGC 6744A, seen here as a smudge to the lower right of NGC 6744, which is reminiscent of one of the Milky Way’s neighboring Magellanic Clouds.read more