Beautiful NGC 5548 in VirgoAstronomy picture of the day!
The importance of this jewel in space is in the 250 Cepheid variable stars that are a key to our understanding of distances in space.
The galaxy is about 72 million light years from us and one of the milestones in the current effort to recalculate more accurately with the help of the fresh images from Hubble Space Telescope the Hubble's Constant i.e. the expansion rate of the Universe.
An extremely important and interesting cosmological riddle - the impact of mysterious dark energy in the expansion of the Universe - is one of the subjects that needs a highly accurate Hubble's Constant.
