#m51

Nice Spiral Galaxy!!

One galaxy.

Two completely different views of reality.

On the left, the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the Whirlpool Galaxy as we’ve long imagined the universe: graceful spiral arms glowing with young stars, radiant clusters, and vast pink nebulae drifting across millions of light-years.

On the right, the James Webb Space Telescope pulls back the cosmic curtain.

Using infrared vision, Webb pierces through thick clouds of dust to uncover what was hidden beneath all along — a chaotic network of luminous filaments, collapsing gas clouds, and countless stellar nurseries where new stars are being born at this very moment.

This is M51 — the Whirlpool Galaxy, located 31 million light-years from Earth.

Same galaxy.

Two astonishingly different realities.

Hubble captures the universe in visible light.

Webb reveals the hidden framework behind it.

For the first time in human history, we are no longer only observing the surface of the cosmos.

We are seeing through the dust… and into the universe as it truly exists.

Credits: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI

This galaxy is slightly smaller than our own and can be found just under the first star in the handle of the Dipper: Alkaid.

This is M51, also known as the Whirlpool Galaxy it is a pair a galaxy currently interacting together. If you look at the two arms of the spiral, you will see that the one on the left is somewhat deformed (near the other galaxy) this is due to the gravitational interaction between the two galaxies. Those interaction are also the reason why the left galaxy (NGC 5195) is this irregular. Some of the models have proposed that both galaxies have passed through each other at some point in the past. In the future both galaxie will slowly fuse together, but this will take at least a few hundred million years. Multiple other interacting galaxies also exist, such as the butterfly galaxies or the antenna galaxies.