PHOTO OF THE DAY: NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope Captures Image of Largest-Known Spiral Galaxy

galaxy NGC 6872 is 522,000 light-years across

This Jan. 10, 2013, composite image of the giant barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872 combines visible light images from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope with far-ultraviolet data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer and infrared data acquired by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. (NASA image)

(NASA) – On Jan. 10, 2013, a composite image of the giant barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872 combines visible light images from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope with far-ultraviolet data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer and infrared data acquired by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

NGC 6872 is 522,000 light-years across.

This makes it more than five times the size of the Milky Way galaxy; in 2013, astronomers from the United States, Chile, and Brazil found it to be the largest-known spiral galaxy, based on archival data from GALEX.

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