Cosmological Curiosity

This image features the spiral galaxy Mrk (Markarian) 1337, which is roughly 120 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Virgo. Hubble snapped Mrk 1337 at a wide range of ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths, producing this richly detailed image. Mrk 1337 is a weakly barred spiral galaxy, which as the name suggests means that the spiral arms radiate from a central bar of gas and stars. Bars occur in roughly half of spiral galaxies, including our own galaxy, the Milky Way. These observations are part of a campaign to improve our knowledge of how fast the universe is expanding. They were proposed by Adam Riess, who – along with Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt – was awarded a 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for contributions to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.