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The spiral is a frequent symbol for spiritual purification, both within Christianity and beyond (one thinks of the spiral as the neo-Platonist symbol for prayer and contemplation, circling around a subject and ascending at the same time, and as a Buddhist symbol for the gradual process on the Path to Enlightenment).
Spiral galaxies form a class of galaxy originally described by Edwin Hubble in his 1936 work The Realm of the Nebulae [1] and, as such, form part of the Hubble sequence. Most spiral galaxies consist of a flat, rotating disk containing stars , gas and dust , and a central concentration of stars known as the bulge .
special case of the logarithmic spiral Spiral of Theodorus (also known as Pythagorean spiral) c. 500 BC: contiguous right triangles composed of one leg with unit length and the other leg being the hypotenuse of the prior triangle: approximates the Archimedean spiral involute: 1673
The nearest known quasar, Markarian 231, is about 581 million light-years from Earth, [129] while others have been discovered as far away as UHZ1, roughly 13.2 billion light-years distant. [ 130 ] [ 131 ] Quasars are noteworthy for providing the first demonstration of the phenomenon that gravity can act as a lens for light .
NGC 1300, viewed nearly face-on; Hubble Space Telescope image. A barred spiral galaxy is a spiral galaxy with a central bar-shaped structure composed of stars. [1] Bars are found in about two thirds of all spiral galaxies in the local universe, [2] and generally affect both the motions of stars and interstellar gas within spiral galaxies and can affect spiral arms as well.
An image of NGC 45, a low surface brightness spiral galaxy, by GALEX. UGC 477 is located over 110 million light-years away in the constellation of Pisces. [1]A low-surface-brightness galaxy, or LSB galaxy, is a diffuse galaxy with a surface brightness that, when viewed from Earth, is at least one magnitude lower than the ambient night sky.
The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) was completed in September 2012 and shows the farthest galaxies ever photographed at that time. Except for the few stars in the foreground (which are bright and easily recognizable because only they have diffraction spikes), every speck of light in the photo is an individual galaxy, some of them as old as 13.2 billion years; the observable universe is ...
A spiral galaxy is organized into a flat, rotating disk, usually with a prominent bulge or bar at the center, and trailing bright arms that spiral outward. The arms are dusty regions of star formation within which massive young stars produce a blue tint. Spiral galaxies are typically surrounded by a halo of older stars.