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Stephan's Quintet
The Wide Field Camera 3 captured this still life of Stephan's Quintet, a group of five galaxies. (It's also known as Hickson Compact Group 92.) At the top right is NGC 7319, a barred spiral, and those blue and red specks are clusters of thousands of stars.
At the center are two galaxies that appear from this perspective almost as one, where there's "a frenzy of star birth" going on. (For the record, they're NGC 7318A and NGC 7318B.) At bottom left is NGC 7317, which NASA describes as "a normal-looking elliptical galaxy."
At upper left is the dwarf galaxy NGC 7320, where the blue and pink dots represent bursts of star formation. It's actually much closer to Earth (40 million light-years away) than the other four galaxies here (290 million light-years away, in the constellation Pegasus).
September 11, 2009 9:49 AM PDT
Photo by: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team
| Caption by: Jonathan Skillings
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