M101, Pinwheel Galaxy, Spiral Galaxy
The Pinwheel galaxy can be seen with a pair of binoculars in the constellation Ursa Major. It is a grand design spiral galaxy, which is a disk of hundreds of billions of stars with a small central bulge and prominent arms spiraling out from the center. In this image, stars appear blue because they are hotter and glow brightly in the shorter wavelengths observed by WISE. Cooler dust glows in the longer wavelengths seen by WISE, which are colored green and red here. The spiral arms contain slightly more stars than the rest of the disk, and most of the dust is concentrated in the arms as well. Along the spiral arms there are several bright spots colored red, including one that appears a short distance above and to the left of the galaxy. At nearly 200,000 light-years across, it is about twice the size of our Milky Way galaxy. NGC 5477, an irregular dwarf galaxy, can be seen near the very top edge of the image.
Size: 3240px × 3240px
Photo credit: © Photo Researchers / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
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