M87 The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy

Messier 83, also known as the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, is a grand design spiral galaxy approximately 15 million light-years away. It’s about half the size of our Milky Way Galaxy but is undergoing much more rapid star formation.

The magnificent spiral arms are peppered with star-forming regions(the pinkish dots) and dense clouds(the dark stripes). The grand structure originates from density waves moving things at different speeds within the galaxy. This created regions of dense material, where stars and interstellar gases are clumped in due to gravitational attraction.

Another interesting fact is that the galaxy is not perfectly symmetrical, probably because it just ate another smaller galaxy (It’s called ‘Galactic Cannibalism’, and I didn’t make that up)

Look closely on the upper left side, you’ll even find two small edge-on galaxies. Those are galaxies much much further away, probably hundreds of millions of light-years away.

(The data was acquired from Telescopelive, which I processed using pixinsight and photoshop)