New Telescopic Images Shed Light on Mysterious

To try to understand the true size and nature of our universe is humbling to say the least.  With recent scientific advances such as the Hubble Telescope, we're now starting to get a few small glimpses into the outer realm called space which shrouds our own planet earth and makes our most significant worries seem trivial.

The Hubble Telescope recently took pictures of a galaxy called M64 also known as the Dark Eye galaxy.  It earned its name because of the strange contrast of dark matter within the center of the galaxy and the lighter, blue and red matter on the outer perimeter of the galaxy.  What's more, it's thought that M64 is actually a combination of 2 different galaxies that may have merged at some point in the past.  The theory is that a smaller galaxy was pulled into a larger one thus causing several strange phenomena such as the continuous crashing together of matter and strange internal movements.

It looks as if the outer rim of the galaxy is moving in the opposite direction of the inner mass of galaxy.  There is a noticeable dark band of dust that stands out vividly in front of the galaxy's bright nucleus.  Some of the new picture from the telescope show an area where hot blue stars have just formed, along with pink clouds of hydrogen gas that glow when exposed to ultraviolet light from the newly formed stars.

To give you an idea of our place relative to the "Black Eye" galaxy it is about 17 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices (Berenice's Hair).  A light-year is about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km), the distance light travels in a year.  So think about that next time you lose $5 on the slots.