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NASA, In Possible Homage to The Cure, Says Galaxy Looks 'Like Salt Sprinkled on Black Velvet'

The lovely photo above (click here for high-res) features the dwarf galaxy UGC 5497, and was just dug up for NASA’s Image of the Day after being captured by the Hubble telescope in 2008. What’s cool about dwarf galaxies is that they’re small — only a...

The lovely photo above (click here for high-res) features the dwarf galaxy UGC 5497, and was just dug up for NASA’s Image of the Day after being captured by the Hubble telescope in 2008. What’s cool about dwarf galaxies is that they’re small — only a few billion stars, versus the few hundred billion in our Milky Way — and as such they look like little poofs of dust floating about the universe.

Or, as one NASA writer put it, UGC 5497 looks like “a bit like salt sprinkled on black velvet.” I don’t know about you, but I find that to be a brilliantly amusing bit of prose amidst the thousands of photo captions written by NASA staff and interns. When you think about the day-to-day of posting some of the most brilliant photos on the internet, you have to imagine that you’d get worn out with trying to come up with new ways of describing far-off star clusters that don’t even have names outside of a jumble of letters and numbers. And then, one day, you come up with a phrase that sounds like it could be the hook of a Cure track.

Follow Derek Mead: @derektmead.

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