NGC210 is getting photobombed.
At the center of this image is the distant galaxy NGC210, 65 million light-years away within the constellation Cetus. It’s mind-blowing that we can capture an image of something so distant from our backyards, given the right technology. It’s also mind-blowing that we’re looking at light that has been traveling for 65 million years, giving us a view of this galaxy as it appeared just as dinosaurs were going extinct on Earth.
But even MORE mind-blowing are all of the even more distant galaxies you can spot in the background. Some are hundreds of millions of light-years away; some are closer, but oddly shaped. Basically anything that isn’t round – no matter how tiny – is a galaxy (and some of the round things are, too.) And every galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars, and hundreds of billions of worlds. Perhaps somewhere in this image, someone is peering at our Milky Way galaxy from afar, seeing it during our age of dinosaurs.
