WISE

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Observation • May 25th, 2011

At about 55,500 light-years across, M83 is s a bit more than half the size of our Milky Way Galaxy, but it has a similar overall structure. Like the Milky Way, most of M83's stars, dust, and gas lie in a thin disk decorated with grand spiral arms. This galaxy is classified as a barred spiral because, in addition to a central bulge of stars, it has a central bar-shaped region of stars. It is 15 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra.