File:Images of a Galaxy in the Fornax Cluster of Galaxies (1996-21-423).jpg

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Captions

Captions

This color image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a region in NGC 1365, a barred spiral galaxy located in a cluster of galaxies called Fornax. A barred spiral galaxy is characterized by a "bar" of stars, dust and gas across its center.

Summary

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Description
English: This color image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a region in NGC 1365, a barred spiral galaxy located in a cluster of galaxies called Fornax. A barred spiral galaxy is characterized by a "bar" of stars, dust and gas across its center. The black and white photograph from a ground-based telescope shows the entire galaxy, which is visible from the Southern Hemisphere. Members of the Key Project team, who have been measuring the distance to the Fornax cluster, have estimated it to be 60 million light-years from Earth. The team arrived at their preliminary estimate by using Cepheids, bright, young stars that are used as milepost markers to calculate distances to nearby galaxies. The line of small blue dots in the color image shows the formation of stars in the galaxy's spiral arms, making them ideal targets for the discovery of Cepheids. The group has discovered about 50 Cepheids in the galaxy. The team also has used the Fornax cluster to calibrate and compare many secondary distance methods. Cepheids are accurate distance markers for nearby galaxies, but astronomers need secondary methods to measure distances to faraway galaxies. An accurate value for the Hubble Constant is dependent on reliable secondary distance methods.
Date 9 May 1996 (upload date)
Source Images of a Galaxy in the Fornax Cluster of Galaxies
Author W. Freedman (Carnegie Observatories), the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project team and NASA
Keywords
InfoField
Variable Stars; Galaxies; Stars; Cosmology; Distant Galaxies; Spiral Galaxies

Licensing

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Public domain This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material. This license does not apply if ESA material created after 2008 or source material from other organizations is in use.
The material was created for NASA by Space Telescope Science Institute under Contract NAS5-26555, or for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre. Copyright statement at hubblesite.org or 2008 copyright statement at spacetelescope.org.
For material created by the European Space Agency on the spacetelescope.org site since 2009, use the {{ESA-Hubble}} tag.

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current17:40, 15 June 2024Thumbnail for version as of 17:40, 15 June 20242,813 × 2,049 (481 KB)OptimusPrimeBot (talk | contribs)#Spacemedia - Upload of https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01EVTAP8698C4WB6M6M7HC5NBV.jpg via Commons:Spacemedia

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