27 years of Hubble: NASA celebrates with two stunning spiral galaxies! - See pic

Image courtesy: NASA/ESA/M. Mutchler (STScI)

New Delhi: Ever since its existence, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has proved its efficiency time and again.

Giving scientists hope of discovering evolutionary secrets of the universe, Hubble has helped unearth massive revelations, most of which have turned out to be breakthroughs in the world of space.

Helping scientists reach out into the depths of the universe and discover numerous things that would have otherwise, been impossible, Hubble has been highly dependable and has played the role of astronomers' and scientists' third eye, often digging out information that was least expected.

Now, upon completing 27 successful, and more importantly, fruitful years, the US space agency celebrated the anniversary of its launch (April 24, 1990) by capturing a portrait of a stunning pair of spiral galaxies.

This starry pair offers a glimpse of what our Milky Way galaxy would look like to an outside observer.

As per NASA, the edge-on galaxy is called NGC 4302, and the tilted galaxy is NGC 4298. These galaxies look quite different because we see them angled at different positions on the sky. They are actually very similar in terms of their structure and contents.

From our view on Earth, researchers report an inclination of 90 degrees for NGC 4302, which is exactly edge on. NGC 4298 is tilted 70 degrees.

NASA further reported that, both galaxies are approximately 55 million light-years away. They reside in the constellation Coma Berenices in the Virgo Cluster of nearly 2,000 galaxies. Both were discovered in 1784 by astronomer William Herschel. Such objects were first simply called "spiral nebulas," because it wasn't known how far away they were. In the early 20th century, Edwin Hubble discovered that galaxies are other island cities of stars far outside our Milky Way.

The Hubble observations were taken between January 2 and January 22, 2017 with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instrument in three visible light bands.