In space, being outshone is an occupational hazard. This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures a galaxy named NGC 7250.
Despite being remarkable in its own right – it has bright bursts of star formation and recorded supernova explosions – it blends into the background somewhat thanks to the gloriously bright star hogging the limelight next to it.
The bright object seen in this Hubble image is a single and little-studied star named TYC 3203-450-1, located in the constellation of Lacerta (The Lizard). The star is much closer than the much more distant galaxy.
Only this way can a normal star outshine an entire galaxy, consisting of billions of stars.
Astronomers studying distant objects call these stars "foreground stars" and they are often not very happy about them, as their bright light is contaminating the faint light from the more distant and interesting objects they actually want to study.
In this case, TYC 3203-450-1 is million times closer than NGC 7250, which lies more than 45 million light-years away from us.
If the star were the same distance from us as NGC 7250, it would hardly be visible in this image.
This entrancing image shows a few of the tenuous threads that comprise Sh2-308, a faint and wispy shell of gas located 5,200 light-years away in the constellation of Canis Major (The Great Dog).
Sh2-308 is a large bubble-like structure wrapped around an extremely large, bright type of star known as a Wolf-Rayet Star – this particular star is called EZ Canis Majoris. These type of stars are … read more
