The galaxy has a pinwheel shape made up of bright blue stars wound around a yellow-white hub of central stars. The hub has a slash of stars across it, called a bar. The galaxy is tilted face-on to our view from Earth. A slightly s-shaped white line across the top is a Hubble image is of an asteroid streaking across Hubble’s view. It looks dashed because the image is a combination of several exposures of the asteroid flying by like a race car.

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Space Telescope Science Inst. (spacetelescope@astrodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 18-Apr-2024 19:06:18 UTC Space Telescope Science Inst.

Cataloging asteroids is tricky because they are faint and they don't stop to be photographed as they zip along their orbits around the Sun. Astronomers recently used a trove of archived Hubble images to snag a largely unseen population of smaller asteroids in their tracks. (1/6)

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