For hundreds of years, people have claimed that technological progress
would soon liberate humanity from the need to work. Today we have
capabilities our ancestors couldn’t have imagined, but those predictions
still haven’t come true. In the US we actually work longer hours than
we did a couple generations ago—the poor in order to survive, the rich
in order to compete. Others desperately seek employment, hardly enjoying
the comfortable leisure all this progress should provide. Despite the
talk of recession and the need for austerity measures, corporations are
reporting record earnings, the wealthiest are wealthier than ever, and
tremendous quantities of goods are produced just to be thrown away.
There’s plenty of wealth, but it’s not being used to liberate humanity.
In this Hubble image, you’ll find 50 spiral and dwarf galaxies hanging out in our cosmic neighborhood. The main focal point of stars is actually a dwarf galaxy. Dwarf galaxies often show a hazy structure, an ill-defined shape and an appearance somewhat akin to a swarm or cloud of stars — and UGC 685 is no exception to this.
These data were gathered under Hubble’s Legacy ExtraGalactic UV Survey (LEGUS) program, the sharpest and most comprehensive ultraviolet survey of star-forming galaxies in the nearby universe.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA; the LEGUS team, B. Tully, D. Calzetti
Hieroglyphs
decorate the walls
of the burial chamber in the Pyramid of Pepi I, South Saqqara. It was in Pepi I’s pyramid that these texts were initially discovered in 1880 by Gaston Maspero, though they originated in the Pyramid of Unas.
