The “Silver Sliver” Galaxy
Try saying that three times fast! Fortunately, the “Silver Sliver Galaxy” has a formal name that’s easier to pronounce: NGC 891. It’s about 30 million light-years away, and is thought to be very similar to what our own Milky Way galaxy would look like when viewed edge-on.
Explore the wider-field image; click on it for full resolution, and you’ll find countless smaller galaxies in the background. They’re not necessarily smaller, they’re just farther away – and the sheer quantity of them really drives home just how vast space is, and how many alien worlds are out there. Every galaxy you see contains billions of stars and billions of planets, and this is just one tiny patch of the sky here.
