WISE

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Observation • May 25th, 2011

Barnard's Galaxy is known as a dwarf for its small size -- it has only about one percent of the mass of the Milky Way. The galaxy's irregular shape is dominated by a central bar of stars, whose appearance resembles that of the nearby satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. It is therefore given a classification of "Magellanic type." The prominent yellow blobs seen against the blue stellar background are sites of recent star formation. Barnard's Galaxy is 1.6 million light-years away in the Sagittarius constellation, and is about 7,000 light-years across.