The Milky Way

### Other Galaxies

The universe contains somewhere in the ballpark of 100 billion and 200 billion galaxies. With numbers that large, you can bet that there are some real weirdos out there. Out beyond our Milky Way, there are galaxies shaped like jellyfish, galaxies that consume other galaxies, and galaxies that seem to lack the dark matter that pervades the rest of the universe.

#### BLACK EYE GALAXY

The Black Eye or Evil Eye galaxy gets its nicknames from the band of light-absorbing dust that appears in front of the star system's bright center in this Hubble Space Telescope image. Messier 64, as the Black Eye galaxy is more formally known, is thought to have taken on its ominous appearance after it collided with another galaxy perhaps a billion years ago.

#### ANDROMEDA GALAXY

The Andromeda galaxy, also known as Messier 31, is the largest neighboring galaxy to the Milky Way. This photo, a mosaic of ten images captured by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer spacecraft in 2003, shows blue-white regions along the galaxy's arms where new stars are forming and a central orange-white area containing older, cooler stars.

#### CARTWHEEL GALAXY

This false-color view of the Cartwheel galaxy was created by combining images captured by four space telescopes: Galaxy Evolution Explorer, Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and Chandra X-ray Observatory. Astronomers think a smaller galaxy, possibly one of two galaxies seen here (bottom left), passed through the center of the Cartwheel galaxy about 100 million years ago.

## galaxy,
any of the systems of stars
and interstellar matter that make up the universe.
Many such assemblages are so enormous
that they contain hundreds of billions of stars.

## Mariner 9

50 Years Ago: Mariner 9 Enters Mars Orbit
Mars 1971
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## Shuttle Columbia

40 Years Ago: Columbia Returns to Space on the STS-2 Mission
Nov 1981
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## Gemini XII

55 Years Ago: Gemini XII Closes Out a Successful Program
June 1966
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## Our Team

#### General Lester L. Lyles

#### Krista Paquin

#### N. Wayne Hale

#### Maryam Boneh

#### John W. Borghese

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