14 DAY TRIAL // As part of an ongoing effort to figure out how far the beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 4921 is from Earth, astronomers at NASA recently used the famous Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to capture a few breathtaking images of the object. The galaxy appears disk-on as seen from our vantage point.
Even though it looks fairly luminous in this image, the galaxy has actually been dubbed anemic by researchers, because it exhibits a very low rate of stellar formation, and is significantly dimmer than it should be for an object of its age. Currently, it is estimated that NGC 4921 lies 310 million light-years away from Earth.
Identifying the exact location of a cosmic formation is not very easy. For example, astronomers do not know the recession speed of this particular galaxy, meaning that any estimate on the distance separating us from it is largely speculative.
Hubble will have to study a number of cosmic beacons called Cepheid variable stars to provide a more meaningful estimation. What is known for certain at this point is that NGC 4921 lies in the Coma Cluster of galaxies, which is located some 321 million light-years away from Earth.