The Pinwheel galaxy, 27 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major, otherwise known as Messier 101, is gilded by bright reddish edges in this new infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. M101 is nearly twice the size of the Milky Way with huge and extremely bright H II regions, which usually accompany enormous clouds of high density molecular hydrogen gas contracting under their own gravitational force where stars form. Research from Spitzer has revealed that this outer red zone lacks organic molecules present in the rest of the galaxy. The red and blue spots outside of the spiral galaxy are either foreground stars or more distant galaxies

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