This dying galaxy is strangely beautiful

There is a beginning and an end to everything. We often measure time in terms of how long our species tend to live, and over that relatively short span it can seem like stars, planets, and galaxies live "forever." That's not true, of course, but since these objects and structures exist for so much longer than we do, it's difficult to imagine how something like a galaxy could die. Luckily we have scientists, and those scientists have ultra-powerful hardware capable of showing us what it looks like when these celestial objects reach the end of their lives, and the Hubble Space Telescope recently captured a gorgeous image of a galaxy that is truly in the throes of death.

NGC 1947 is a spiral galaxy — or at least it used to be. In an image captured by Hubble, we see little more than faint wisps of gas surrounding the galaxy's interior which is still packed with millions of stars. The galaxy is old and based on its current condition it's unlikely that it will exist for much longer.