Discovery News

You may not have heard of NGC 6744, a galaxy about 30 million light years away from Earth, but it sure looks familiar.

The beautiful spiral galaxy, located in the southern constellation
Pavo (The Peacock), is a virtual copy of our own Milky Way, though about
twice as big.

3-D Galaxy Map Reveals Cosmic Neighborhood

“If we had the technology to escape the Milky Way and could look down
on it from intergalactic space, this view is close to the one we would
see — striking spiral arms wrapping around a dense, elongated nucleus
and a dusty disc,” writes European Southern Observatory press officer
Richard Hook.

“There is even a distorted companion galaxy — NGC 6744A, seen here
as a smudge to the lower right of NGC 6744 — which is reminiscent of
one of the Milky Way’s neighboring Magellanic Clouds,” he adds.

ANALYSIS: Bean Nebula’s Bubbles of Glowing Gas

The picture was taken by the Wide Field Imager attached to the
MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. It
was assembled from images taken through four different filters, pictured
here in blue, green, orange and red.