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The beauty of the galactic triangle
It’s close, but it took the Hubble telescope to see it more closely. Today, its extraordinary beauty can be fully admired. This is the Triangulum Galaxy.
Also named Messier 33, it belongs to a local cluster of galaxies called the Local Group. It is only 2.9 million light-years from Earth and is the closest galaxy to us after Andromeda. It is also the most distant object in our sky, which can sometimes be seen without a telescope. Under favourable conditions, when the night sky is very clear, it is visible to the naked eye as a small, fuzzy, bright speck.
However, it has never been possible to view it in such detail before. It wasn’t until the Hubble Space Telescope that a more detailed view of the spot became possible. The Hubble Space Telescope unveiled an image of the speck created from 54 images taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Survey (visible on picture above). More than 10 million stars can be counted on it!
This cosmic neighbor of ours (named after the constellation Triangle, within which it is visible in the sky), Andromeda and the Milky Way are the three largest galaxies of the Local Group. All three are spirals. In addition to them, there are dozens more (about 50) much smaller, mostly dwarf, usually irregular galaxies in the Local Group. They all revolve around a common center of mass.
