Astronomy Picture of the Week – Distant Spiral Galaxy NGC 4603
This photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a magnificent view of the spiral galaxy NGC 4603. It is a very distant galaxy because it is located in the Centaurus cluster about 108 million light-years away from Earth.
It is the most distant galaxy in which a special class of pulsating stars called Cepheid variables have been found. About 36-50 of those stars have been observed. Cepheid variables are used as points of reference because their rate of pulsation can be easily calculated. Observing Cepheids so far away helps astronomers to precisely measure the expansion rate of the universe.
Image credit: Jeffrey Newman (Univ. of California at Berkeley) and NASA.
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Paul Tomaszewski
Paul Tomaszewski is a science & tech writer as well as a programmer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of CosmoBC. He has a degree in computer science from John Abbott College, a bachelor's degree in technology from the Memorial University of Newfoundland, and completed some business and economics classes at Concordia University in Montreal. While in college he was the vice-president of the Astronomy Club. In his spare time he is an amateur astronomer and enjoys reading or watching science-fiction. You can follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
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