File:Surveying the cosmos (35414921371).jpg

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The object in the middle of this image, sitting alone within a star-studded cosmos, is a galaxy known as ESO 486-21. ESO 486-21 is a spiral galaxy — albeit with a somewhat irregular and ill-defined structure — located some 30 million light-years from Earth.

The Hubble Space Telescope observed this object while performing a survey — the Legacy ExtraGalactic UV Survey (LEGUS) — of 50 nearby star-forming galaxies. The LEGUS sample was selected to cover a diverse range of galactic morphologies, star formation rates, galaxy masses, and more. Astronomers use such data to understand how stars form and evolve within clusters, and how these processes affect both their home galaxy and the wider universe. ESO 486-21 is an ideal candidate for inclusion in such a survey as it is known to be in the process of forming new stars, which are created when large clouds of gas and dust (seen here in pink) within the galaxy crumple inwards upon themselves.

LEGUS made use of Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The WFC3 obtained detailed observations of the target objects while the ACS obtained what are known as parallel fields — instead of leaving ACS idle, it was instead trained on a small patch of sky just offset from the target field itself, allowing it to gather additional valuable information while the primary target was being observed by WFC3. Parallel fields played an important role in Hubble’s Frontier Fields program, which used the magnifying power of large galaxy clusters (via a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing) to explore objects in the distant universe.
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Source Surveying the cosmos
Author NASA Hubble Space Telescope

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This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
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This image was originally posted to Flickr by NASA Hubble at https://flickr.com/photos/144614754@N02/35414921371 (archive). It was reviewed on 13 July 2018 by FlickreviewR 2 and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0.

13 July 2018

Public domain This file is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". (See Template:PD-USGov, NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy.)
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current15:32, 13 July 2018Thumbnail for version as of 15:32, 13 July 20181,041 × 556 (77 KB)Hiàn (alt) (talk | contribs)Transferred from Flickr via #flickr2commons

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