An edge-on view of the spiral galaxy NGC 5023, which lies over 30 million light-years away from us. Due to its orientation seen here by our Hubble Space Telescope, we cannot appreciate its spiral arms, but we can admire the elegant profile of its disk. Astronomers are particularly interested in the vertical structure of disks like these to help understand galaxy evolution.
The incredible sharp sight of Hubble has allowed scientist to count more than 30,000 individual bright stars in this image. This is only a small fraction of the several billion stars that this galaxy contains, but the others are too faint to detect individually even with Hubble.
Credit: ESA/NASA
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