Hubble's View of NGC 4911

This week’s OOTW features an OOTD by Alice written on Thursday 12th of August.

With a redshift of 0.027 this spiral galaxy lies 320 million light years away from us. It’s NGC 4911, a spiral galaxy in the Coma Cluster; a city of galaxies gravitationally bound to each other in the constellation Coma Berenices. LEDA 83751 – the larger elliptical overlapping the galaxy – is actually sat in front of the spiral, which isn’t the best situation for overlap hunters:

Overlapping galaxies are especially useful to Bill and other astronomers interested in dust – the background galaxy acts like a torch, showing what the dust is doing in the former one. The best situation is an elliptical being further away than a spiral, since spirals tend to be dustier and more interesting. Sadly this pair appears to have the bad manners to be the other way round. How rude :D.

– A quote from Alice’s OOTD.

A new Hubble image of this galaxy has been released showing in more detail the huge amount of star formation going on nearer to the nucleus of the galaxy, the dust lanes streaking their way around the beginning of its spiral arms,  and the wispy spiral structures wrapping their arms around the bustling galactic centre.