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A galaxy viewed edge-on, looking like a thick line of gas and dust running from the top-left corner to the bottom-right corner. The center of the "line" (the thickest area of gas) is black, then surrounded above and blow with red-brown dust, and above and below that with a white halo. This halo is thicker in the top-left, and the center gleams as a four-pronged white dot. Dozens more stars and galaxies dot the black background in the distance.

NGC 4013: A Galaxy on the Edge

NGC 4013 is a spiral galaxy, similar to our own Milky Way. Viewed pole-on, it would look like a nearly circular pinwheel, but NGC 4013 happens to be seen edge-on from our vantage point. Even at 55 million light-years away, the galaxy is larger than Hubble's field of view, and the image shows only a little more than half of the object. Dark clouds of interstellar dust stand out in the picture because they absorb the light of background stars. These clouds are believed to be where new stars are formed. NGC 4013 is located in the northern sky near the rear foot of Ursa Major, the Great Bear.

Image Credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); Acknowledgment: J.C. Howk (Johns Hopkins University) and B.D. Savage (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
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Image CreditNASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); Acknowledgment: J.C. Howk (Johns Hopkins University) and B.D. Savage (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
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