May 11, 2000
Somewhere above you, light is arriving from places so distant their names feel like poetry.
NGC 3314: When Galaxies Overlap
Birthday · May 11, 2000
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APOD published May 11, 2000. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Can this be a spiral galaxy? In fact, NGC 3314 consists of two large spiral galaxies which just happen to almost exactly line-up. The foreground spiral is viewed nearly face-on, its pinwheel shape defined by young bright star clusters. But against the glow of the background galaxy, dark swirling lanes of interstellar dust are also seen to echo the face-on spiral's structure. The dust lanes are surprisingly pervasive, and this remarkable pair of overlapping galaxies is one of a small number of systems in which absorption of visible light can be used to directly explore the distribution of dust in distant spirals. NGC 3314 is about 140 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Hydra. Just released, this color composite was constructed from Hubble Space Telescope images made in 1999 and 2000.