The Triangulum Galaxy, also called M33, is a member of our Local Group, which is the small cluster of nearby galaxies that includes our own Milky Way Galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy. The Triangulum Galaxy is located 2.9 million light-years from Earth in the Triangulum constellation.

The Triangulum Galaxy has a spiral shape similar to the Milky Way. However, its disk is only 50.000 light-years across, half the diameter of our Milky Way Galaxy and astronomers believe it has one-tenth the mass of the Milky Way.

In the image below, the giant star-forming region NGC 604 is shown. With 1,500 light-years in diameter (40 times that of our Milky Way´s Orion Nebula), it is the largest stellar nursery in our Local Group, a place where the stars are born. Young, hot stars heat up the surrounding gas clouds to high temperatures radiating brightly in ultraviolet light.

http://thefutureofthings.com/upload/items_icons/Triangulum-Galaxy_large.jpg
This image was created by NASA combining several frames taken over a period of 11 hours creating an ultraviolet mosaic of the Triangulum Galaxy. This is the most detailed ultraviolet image of an entire galaxy ever taken. The images were captured by NASA’s Swift’s Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope.
Source(s):
http://thefutureofthings.com/pod/1121/triangulum-galaxy.html

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