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A beautiful but skewed spiral galaxy dazzles in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. The galaxy, called Arp 184 or NGC 1961, sits about 190 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Camelopardalis (The Giraffe).
The name Arp 184 comes from the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies compiled by astronomer Halton Arp in 1966. It holds 338 galaxies that are oddly shaped and tend to be neither entirely elliptical nor entirely spiral-shaped. Many of the galaxies are in the process of interacting with other galaxies, while others are dwarf galaxies without well-defined structures. Arp 184 earned its spot in the catalog thanks to its single broad, star-speckled spiral arm that appears to stretch toward us. The galaxy’s far side sports a few wisps of gas and stars, but it lacks a similarly impressive spiral arm.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, R. J. Foley (UC Santa Cruz), C. Kilpatrick
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Knot your average discovery!
We thought there was just one, but Webb revealed there are at least 3 galaxies forming a cosmic knot around this quasar. A quasar is a super bright galactic core, powered by a supermassive black hole.
This quasar existed 11.5 billion years ago, and it is unusually “red” — meaning its galaxy’s light has been “redshifted,” or stretched into longer, infrared wavelengths as the universe expands. Data from telescopes like @NASAHubble had shown extended material surrounding this quasar, prompting further study using Webb. With Webb’s NIRSpec instrument, researchers were finally able to map the motions of the material and discover a whole cluster of galaxies!
In the graphic, at left is a Hubble image highlighting the quasar. The images on the right and at the bottom present new observations from Webb in multiple wavelengths. They demonstrate the distribution, speed and direction of gas within the newly observed galaxy cluster around the quasar. The redder the color, the faster the gas is moving away from our line of sight relative to the quasar; the bluer the color, the faster it's moving toward us. The color green indicates that the gas is steady in our line of sight relative to the quasar.
We know of very few “baby” galaxy clusters from the early universe, and Webb offers researchers a rare, exciting opportunity to expand our understanding of how clusters like this one form and evolve: www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-uncovers-de...
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, D. Wylezalek (Heidelberg Univ.), A. Vayner and N. Zakamska (Johns Hopkins Univ.) and the Q-3D Team
[Image description: Infographic titled “Motions of Gas Around an Extremely Red Quasar.” On the left is a Hubble image of a field of galaxies, with one central galaxy spotlighted. On the right is a zoomed-in, multicolor image of that same galaxy, newly revealed by Webb to be part of a galaxy cluster. Four single-color images, taken by Webb in various wavelengths, make up the multicolor image and can be found in more detail at the bottom of the graphic. These images show light from the gas (doubly ionized oxygen atoms) in the galaxy cluster. A color code explains that color represents the motion of the gas, including direction and speed relative to the quasar. From left to right: the first image (blue) shows gas moving toward us at 350 kilometers per second; the second (green) shows gas steady in our line of sight at 0 kilometers per second; the third (orange) shows gas moving away at 370 kilometers per second; the fourth (red) also shows gas moving away, but at 700 kilometers per second.]
Today’s rather aquatic-themed NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy Messier 77, also known as the Squid Galaxy, which sits 45 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus (The Whale).
The designation Messier 77 comes from the galaxy’s place in the famous catalog compiled by the French astronomer Charles Messier. Another French astronomer, Pierre Méchain, discovered the galaxy in 1780. Both Messier and Méchain were comet hunters who cataloged nebulous objects that could be mistaken for comets.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. C. Ho, D. Thilker
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As part of ESA/Hubble’s 35th anniversary celebrations, the European Space Agency (ESA) is sharing a new image series revisiting stunning, previously released Hubble targets with the addition of the latest Hubble data and new processing techniques.
This new image showcases the dazzling young star cluster NGC 346. Although both the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble have released images of NGC 346 previously, this image includes new data and is the first to combine Hubble observations made at infrared, optical, and ultraviolet wavelengths into an intricately detailed view of this vibrant star-forming factory.
This dazzling NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the young star cluster NGC 346.
NGC 346 is in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way that lies 200,000 light-years away in the constellation Tucana. The Small Magellanic Cloud is less rich in elements heavier than helium — what astronomers call metals — than the Milky Way. This makes conditions in the galaxy similar to what existed in the early universe.
NGC 346 is home to more than 2,500 newborn stars. The cluster’s most massive stars, which are many times more massive than our Sun, blaze with an intense blue light in this image. The glowing pink nebula and snakelike dark clouds are sculpted by the luminous stars in the cluster.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Nota, P. Massey, E. Sabbi, C. Murray, M. Zamani (ESA/Hubble)
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This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the picturesque spiral galaxy NGC 4941, which lies about 67 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo (The Maiden). Because this galaxy is nearby, cosmically speaking, Hubble’s keen instruments are able to pick out exquisite details such as individual star clusters and filamentary clouds of gas and dust.
The data used to construct this image were collected as part of an observing program that investigates the star formation and stellar feedback cycle in nearby galaxies. As stars form in dense, cold clumps of gas, they begin to influence their surroundings. Stars heat and stir up the gas clouds in which they form through winds, starlight, and — eventually, for massive stars — by exploding as supernovae. These processes are collectively called stellar feedback, and they influence the rate at which a galaxy can form new stars.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Nota, P. Massey, E. Sabbi, C. Murray, M. Zamani (ESA/Hubble)
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Say hello to one of the Milky Way’s neighbors! This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a scene from one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The SMC is a dwarf galaxy located about 200,000 light-years away. Most of the galaxy resides in the constellation Tucana, but a small section crosses over into the neighboring constellation Hydrus.
Thanks to its proximity, the SMC is one of only a few galaxies that are visible from Earth without the help of a telescope or binoculars. For viewers in the southern hemisphere and some latitudes in the northern hemisphere, the SMC resembles a piece of the Milky Way that has broken off, though in reality it’s much farther away than any part of our own galaxy.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Andersen (European Southern Observatory - Germany); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
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Say hello to one of the Milky Way’s neighbors! This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a scene from one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The SMC is a dwarf galaxy located about 200,000 light-years away. Most of the galaxy resides in the constellation Tucana, but a small section crosses over into the neighboring constellation Hydrus.
Thanks to its proximity, the SMC is one of only a few galaxies that are visible from Earth without the help of a telescope or binoculars. For viewers in the southern hemisphere and some latitudes in the northern hemisphere, the SMC resembles a piece of the Milky Way that has broken off, though in reality it’s much farther away than any part of our own galaxy.
Credit: NASA, ESA and M. West (Lowell Observatory); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy #SmallMagellanicCloud
The sparkling spiral galaxy gracing this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is UGC 5460, which sits about 60 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. This image combines four different wavelengths of light to reveal UGC 5460’s central bar of stars, winding spiral arms, and bright blue star clusters. Also captured in the upper left-hand corner is a far closer object: a star just 577 light-years away in our own galaxy.
UGC 5460 has hosted two recent supernovae: SN 2011ht and SN 2015as. It’s because of these two stellar explosions that Hubble targeted this galaxy, collecting data for three observing programs that aim to study various kinds of supernovae.
SN 2015as was as a core-collapse supernova: a cataclysmic explosion that happens when the core of a star far more massive than the Sun runs out of fuel and collapses under its own gravity, initiating a rebound of material outside the core. Hubble observations of SN 2015as will help researchers understand what happens when the expanding shockwave of a supernova collides with the gas that surrounds the exploded star.
SN 2011ht might have been a core-collapse supernova as well, but it could also be an impostor called a luminous blue variable. Luminous blue variables are rare stars that experience eruptions so large that they can mimic supernovae. Crucially, luminous blue variables emerge from these eruptions unscathed, while stars that go supernova do not. Hubble will search for a stellar survivor at SN 2011ht’s location with the goal of revealing the explosion’s origin.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Jacobson-Galán, A. Filippenko, J. Mauerhan
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Today’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy NGC 4535, which is situated about 50 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo (the Maiden). Through a small telescope, this galaxy appears extremely faint, giving it the nickname ‘Lost Galaxy’. With a mirror spanning nearly eight feet (2.4 meters) across and its location above Earth’s light-obscuring atmosphere, Hubble can easily observe dim galaxies like NGC 4535 and pick out features like its massive spiral arms and central bar of stars.
This image features NGC 4535’s young star clusters, which dot the galaxy’s spiral arms. Glowing-pink clouds surround many of these bright-blue star groupings. These clouds, called H II (‘H-two’) regions, are a sign that the galaxy is home to especially young, hot, and massive stars that blaze with high-energy radiation. Such massive stars shake up their surroundings by heating their birth clouds with powerful stellar winds, eventually exploding as supernovae.
The image incorporates data from an observing program designed to catalog roughly 50,000 H II regions in nearby star-forming galaxies like NGC 4535. Hubble released a previous image of NGC 4535 in 2021. Both the 2021 image and this new image incorporate observations from the PHANGS observing program, which seeks to understand the connections between young stars and cold gas. Today’s image adds a new dimension to our understanding of NGC 4535 by capturing the brilliant red glow of the nebulae that encircle massive stars in their first few million years of life.
Text credit: European Space Agency
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Belfiore, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team
For more information: science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-seeks-clusters-in...
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy NGC 2566, which sits 76 million light-years away in the constellation Puppis. A prominent bar of stars stretches across the center of this galaxy, and spiral arms emerge from each end of the bar. Because NGC 2566 appears tilted from our perspective, its disk takes on an almond shape, giving the galaxy the appearance of a cosmic eye.
As NGC 2566 appears to gaze at us, astronomers gaze right back, using Hubble to survey the galaxy’s star clusters and star-forming regions. The Hubble data are especially valuable for studying stars that are just a few million years old; these stars are bright at the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths to which Hubble is sensitive. Using these data, researchers can measure the ages of NGC 2566’s stars, which helps piece together the timeline of the galaxy’s star formation and the exchange of gas between star-forming clouds and the stars themselves.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker
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Between 2003 and 2004, @NASAHubble spent more than 11 days taking what would become known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, a view of nearly 10,000 galaxies. In 2022, Webb took less than 24 hours to observe that same target in high-resolution.
Why are we revisiting this field? We don’t exactly know how galaxies became how they are today. With its sensitivity, Webb is helping astronomers hunt for the first galaxies and better understand star formation and other galactic properties in the early universe.
In addition, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field has long been studied by a variety of telescopes. Webb’s new data complements previous data sets by providing detailed information for just about all of the galaxies in this field, allowing scientists to piece together the bigger picture.
Read more: blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/04/12/webb-shows-areas-of-new-st...
This image: This image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field was taken by the Near-Infrared Camera on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The Webb image observes the field at depths comparable to Hubble – revealing galaxies of similar faintness – in just one-tenth as much observing time. It includes 1.8-micron light shown in blue, 2.1-micron light shown in green, 4.3-micron light shown in yellow, 4.6-micron light shown in orange, and 4.8-micron light shown in red (filters F182M, F210M, F430M, F460M, and F480M). Download the full resolution from the Space Telescope Science Institute..
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph DePasquale, Christina Williams (NSF’s NOIRLab).
Image description: A rectangular image that appears to be two separate square images separated by a wide black gap. The gap obscures the galaxies present between the two square images. Each square image contains thousands of galaxies with many different colors. Some galaxies are shades of yellow, while others are white or blue. Most of these galaxies appear as fuzzy ovals, but others appear thin and long. A few galaxies with distinct spiral arms are spread throughout.
Against an inky black backdrop, the blue swirls of spiral galaxy NGC 6956 stand out radiantly. NGC 6956 is a barred spiral galaxy, a common type of spiral galaxy with a bar-shaped structure of stars in its center. This galaxy exists 214 million light-years away in the constellation Delphinus.
Scientists used the Hubble Space Telescope to image NGC 6956 to study its Cepheid variable stars, which are stars that brighten and dim at regular periods. Since the period of Cepheid variable stars is a function of their brightness, scientists can measure how bright these stars appear from Earth and compare it to their actual brightness to calculate their distance. As a result, these stars are extremely useful in determining the distance of cosmic objects, which is one of the hardest pieces of information to measure for extragalactic objects.
This galaxy also contains a Type Ia supernova, which is the explosion of a white dwarf star that was gradually accreting matter from a companion star. Like Cepheid variable stars, the brightness of these types of supernovae and how fast they dim over time enables scientists to calculate their distance. Scientists can use the measurements gleaned from Cepheid variable stars and Type Ia supernovae to refine our understanding of the rate of expansion of the universe, also known as the Hubble Constant.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jones (University of California – Santa Cruz); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
For more information, visit: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-captures-m...
Shown here is M92, a cluster of thousands of stars located 27,000 light-years away in our Milky Way. One of Webb’s first science observations, this was taken as part of a program designed to help scientists make the most of Webb.
Why is part of the image black? The center of this cluster is too bright to capture at the same time as the fainter, sparser stars at the edges. The science team decided on this way to display the data because it was the most useful way for them to study the region. For example, it helps show off a gradient of star density. It also overlaps nicely with existing @NASAHubble data, allowing scientists to combine Webb and Hubble imagery to learn something new.
Webb’s longer infrared wavelengths are ideal for observing extremely small, faint stars in very little time, and M92 is a classic target for studying how stars evolve. Not only is it so close that Webb can single out individual stars, but it contains some of the oldest stars we can find in the Milky Way. Using what we learn from M92, we can know more about distant stars in the ancient universe.
Read more: blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/02/22/webb-observes-a-globular-c...
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, A. Pagan (STScI)
[Image description: A rectangular image oriented horizontally appears to be two separate square images with a wide black gap in between. The two squares do not mirror each other exactly or align perfectly together. It looks instead like they are two parts of a larger image that has been obscured in the middle by black strip. Both squares are filled with blue, white, yellow, and red points of light of different size and brightness, most of which are stars. The larger and brighter stars show Webb’s distinctive diffraction pattern consisting of eight spikes radiating from the center. Both squares show an increase in density of stars toward the central gap. Altogether, the stars appear to form a loose ball-like shape whose core is obscured by the gap.]
Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in this 2012 image shows the distribution of hot gas in the core of the merging galaxy cluster Abell 520, formed from a violent collision of massive galaxy clusters that is located about 2.4 billion light years from Earth, and provides evidence that a collision took place.
Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO
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This 100 million-year-old globular cluster is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and a birthplace for billions of stars. The cluster is approximately 160,000 light-years away in the constellation Dorado. Typical of globular clusters, it is a spherical collection of densely packed stars held together by mutual gravitational attraction. Unlike most globular clusters, however, the stars of NGC 1850 are relatively young. Globular clusters with young stars such as NGC 1850 are not present in our own Milky Way galaxy.
Astrophysicists theorize that when the first generation of stars in NGC 1850 was born, the stars ejected matter like dust and gas into the surrounding cosmos. The density of the newly formed star cluster was so high that this ejected matter could not escape the cluster’s gravitational pull, causing it to stay nearby. The intense gravity of the cluster also pulled in hydrogen and helium gas from its surroundings. These two sources of gas combined to form a second generation of stars, increasing the density and size of this globular cluster.
In 2021, scientists detected the presence of a black hole in NGC 1850. They have also detected many brighter blue stars that burn hotter and die younger than red stars. Also present are around 200 red giants, stars that have run out of hydrogen in their centers and are fusing hydrogen further from their core, causing the outer layers to expand, cool, and glow red. Surrounding the cluster is a pattern of nebulosity, diffuse dust and gas theorized to come from supernova blasts, visible here as the blue veil-like structures.
NGC 1850 is approximately 63,000 times the mass of the Sun, and its core is roughly 20 light-years in diameter. Astronomers used Hubble Space Telescope observations at a wide range of wavelengths to image this large star cluster and learn more about star formation.
Credit: NASA, ESA and P. Goudfrooij (Space Telescope Science Institute); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
Hubble studied this star cluster using different filters with to examine particular wavelengths of light. This image includes some near-infrared light along with visible light. For a second image and more info, visit:
www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-captures-d...
For an older Hubble image of NGC 1850, visit:
hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2001/news-2001-25.html
For Hubble’s Star Clusters page, visit: www.nasa.gov/content/discoveries-hubbles-star-clusters
Happy {early} birthday Hubble! 🎉
After more than three decades of perusing the universe, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope remains a household name — the most well-recognized and scientifically productive telescope in history. The Hubble mission is a glowing success story of America’s technological prowess, unyielding scientific curiosity, and a reiteration of our nation’s pioneering spirit.
#NASAMarshall served as the lead NASA field center for the design, development, and construction of the space telescope. Our center was also used to train astronauts on servicing Hubble while in space using Marshall's Neutral Buoyancy Simulator (NBS) as seen in this image.
Hubble will mark 35 years in Earth's orbit on April 24, 2025. To celebrate, NASA is releasing an assortment of compelling images recently taken by Hubble, stretching from the planet Mars to star-forming regions, and a neighboring galaxy. View those and more at nasa.gov/hubble.
Image description: Underwater training is conducted in Marshall's Neutral Buoyancy Simulator (NBS) in preparation for on-orbit Hubble Space Telescope operations. The NBS is a large pool of water that houses a mock-up of the Hubble Space Telescope and a shuttle cargo bay. An astronaut in a full EVA suit, as well as several members of the training crew wearing scuba gear, are seen performing check-out procedures on the Hubble Space Telescope mock-up inside the NBS.
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A colorful, festive image shows different types of light containing the remains of not one, but at least two, exploded stars. This supernova remnant is known as 30 Doradus B (30 Dor B for short) and is part of a larger region of space where stars have been continuously forming for the past 8 to 10 million years. It is a complex landscape of dark clouds of gas, young stars, high-energy shocks, and superheated gas, located 160,000 light-years away from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
The new image of 30 Dor B was made by combining X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple), optical data from the Blanco 4-meter telescope in Chile (orange and cyan), and infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope (red). Optical data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was also added in black and white to highlight sharp features in the image.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State Univ./L. Townsley et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI/HST; Infrared: NASA/JPL/CalTech/SST; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Schmidt, N. Wolk, K. Arcand
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This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a cloudy starscape from an impressive star cluster. This scene is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy situated about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa. With a mass equal to 10–20% of the mass of the Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the dozens of small galaxies that orbit our galaxy.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is home to several massive stellar nurseries where gas clouds, like those strewn across this image, coalesce into new stars. Today’s image depicts a portion of the galaxy’s second-largest star-forming region, which is called N11. (The most massive and prolific star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Tarantula Nebula, is a frequent target for Hubble.) We see bright, young stars lighting up the gas clouds and sculpting clumps of dust with powerful ultraviolet radiation.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray, J. Maíz Apellániz
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A massive, spacetime-warping cluster of galaxies is the setting of today’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. The galaxy cluster in question is Abell 209, located 2.8 billion light-years away in the constellation Cetus (the Whale).
This Hubble image of Abell 209 shows more than a hundred galaxies, but there’s more to this cluster than even Hubble’s discerning eye can see. Abell 209’s galaxies are separated by millions of light-years, and the seemingly empty space between the galaxies is filled with hot, diffuse gas that is visible only at X-ray wavelengths. An even more elusive occupant of this galaxy cluster is dark matter: a form of matter that does not interact with light. Dark matter does not absorb, reflect, or emit light, effectively making it invisible to us. Astronomers detect dark matter by its gravitational influence on normal matter. Astronomers surmise that the universe is comprised of 5% normal matter, 25% dark matter, and 70% dark energy.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Postman, P. Kelly
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This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image offers a new view of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 2835, which lies 35 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra (the Water Snake). The galaxy’s spiral arms are dotted with young blue stars sweeping around an oval-shaped center where older stars reside.
This image differs from previously released images from Hubble and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope because it incorporates new data from Hubble that captures a specific wavelength of red light called H-alpha. The regions that are bright in H-alpha emission are visible along NGC 2835’s spiral arms, where dozens of bright pink nebulae appear like flowers in bloom. Astronomers are interested in H-alpha light because it signals the presence of several different types of nebulae that arise during different stages of a star’s life. Newborn, massive stars create nebulae called H II regions that are particularly brilliant sources of H-alpha light, while dying stars can leave behind supernova remnants or planetary nebulae that can also be identified by their H-alpha emission.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Chandar, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST team
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This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the field of stars that is NGC 1786. The globular cluster is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way Galaxy that is approximately 160,000 light-years away from Earth. NGC 1786 itself is in the constellation Dorado. It was discovered in the year 1835 by Sir John Herschel.
The data for this image comes from an observing program that compares old globular clusters in nearby dwarf galaxies — the LMC, the Small Magellanic Cloud, and the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy — to globular clusters in the Milky Way galaxy. Our galaxy contains over 150 of these old, spherical collections of tightly-bound stars, which astronomers have studied in depth — especially with Hubble images like this one, which show them in previously unattainable detail. Being very stable and long-lived, globular clusters act as galactic time capsules, preserving stars from the earliest stages of a galaxy’s formation.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Monelli; Acknowledgment: M. H. Özsaraç
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A galaxy ablaze with young stars is the subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. Named NGC 685, this galaxy is situated about 64 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus (the River). NGC 685 is a barred spiral because its feathery spiral arms sprout from the ends of a bar of stars at the galaxy’s center. The Milky Way is also a barred spiral, but our galaxy is a little less than twice the size of NGC 685.
Astronomers used Hubble to study NGC 685 for two observing programs, both focused on star formation. It’s no surprise that NGC 685 was part of these programs: numerous patches of young, blue stars highlight the galaxy’s spiral arms. Also visible are pink gas clouds, called H II (pronounced ‘H-two’) regions, that glow for a short time when particularly hot and massive stars are born. An especially eye-catching H II region peeks out at the bottom edge of the image. Despite the dozens of star-forming regions evident in this image, NGC 685 converts an amount of gas equivalent to less than half the mass of the Sun into stars each year.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee, F. Belfiore
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This serene spiral galaxy hides a cataclysmic past. The galaxy IC 758, shown in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, is situated 60 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.
Hubble captured this image in 2023. IC 758 appears peaceful, with its soft blue spiral arms curving gently around its hazy barred center. However, in 1999, astronomers spotted a powerful explosion in this galaxy. The supernova SN 1999bg marked the dramatic end of a star far more massive than the Sun.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Kilpatrick
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The barred spiral galaxy UGC 678 takes center stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The spectacular galaxy lies around 260 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pisces and is almost face on, allowing its lazily winding spiral arms to stretch across this image. In the foreground, a smaller edge-on galaxy seems to bisect the upper portion of UGC 678.
Barred spiral galaxies have a bar-shaped structure of stars that extends from opposite sides of the galaxy’s central bulge. Bars form in spiral galaxies when the orbits of stars near the galaxy’s heart become unstable and stretched out. As their orbits lengthen, they create a bar. The bar grows as their gravity captures more and more nearby stars. UGC 678’s bar is faint. It is visible as a diagonal group of stars that stretches from the lower left (7 o’clock) to the upper right (1 o’clock) of the galaxy’s core.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Kilpatrick, R.J. Foley
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2023/hubble-spotlights...
The jellyfish galaxy JW39 hangs serenely in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy lies over 900 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices and is one of several jellyfish galaxies Hubble has been studying over the past two years.
Despite this jellyfish galaxy’s serene appearance, it is adrift in a ferociously hostile environment: a galaxy cluster. Compared to their more isolated counterparts, the galaxies in galaxy clusters are often distorted by the gravitational pull of larger neighbors, which can twist galaxies into a variety of shapes. If that was not enough, the space between galaxies in a cluster is also pervaded with a searingly hot plasma known as the intracluster medium. While this plasma is extremely tenuous, galaxies moving through it experience it almost like swimmers fighting against a current, and this interaction can strip galaxies of their star-forming gas.
This interaction between the intracluster medium and the galaxies is called ram-pressure stripping and is the process responsible for the trailing tendrils of this jellyfish galaxy. As JW39 moved through the cluster, the pressure of the intracluster medium stripped away gas and dust into long trailing ribbons of star formation that now stretch away from the disk of the galaxy.
Astronomers using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 studied these trailing tendrils in detail, as they are a particularly extreme environment for star formation. Surprisingly, they found that star formation in the ‘tentacles’ of jellyfish galaxies was not noticeably different from star formation in the galaxy disk.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Gullieuszik and the GASP team
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2023/hubble-captures-a...
This luminous image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows Z 229-15, a celestial object that lies about 390 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. Z 229-15 is one of those interesting celestial objects defined as several different things: sometimes as an active galactic nucleus (an AGN); sometimes as a quasar; and sometimes as a Seyfert galaxy. Which of these is Z 229-15 really? The answer is that it is all these things all at once, because these three definitions have significant overlap.
An AGN is a small region at the heart of certain galaxies (called active galaxies) that is far brighter than just the galaxy’s stars would be. The extra luminosity is due to the presence of a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core. Material sucked into a black hole doesn’t fall directly into it, but instead is drawn into a swirling disk, from where it is inexorably tugged towards the black hole. This disk of matter gets so hot that it releases a large amount of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum, and that’s what makes AGNs appear so bright.
Quasars are a particular type of AGN; they are typically both extremely bright and extremely distant from Earth – several hundred million light-years is considered nearby for a quasar, making Z 229-15 positively local. Often an AGN is so bright that the rest of the galaxy cannot be seen, but Seyfert galaxies are active galaxies that host very bright AGNs (quasars) while the rest of the galaxy is still observable. So Z 229-15 is a Seyfert galaxy that contains a quasar, and that, by definition, hosts an AGN. Classification in astronomy can be a challenge!
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Barth, R. Mushotzky
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2023/hubble-views-an-i...
This portrait from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope puts the nearby galaxy NGC 4449 in the spotlight. The galaxy is situated just 12.5 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs). It is a member of the M94 galaxy group, which is near the Local Group of galaxies that the Milky Way is part of.
NGC 4449 is a dwarf galaxy, which means that it is far smaller and contains fewer stars than the Milky Way. But don’t let its small size fool you — NGC 4449 packs a punch when it comes to making stars! This galaxy is currently forming new stars at a much faster rate than expected for its size, which makes it a starburst galaxy. Most starburst galaxies churn out stars mainly in their centers, but NGC 4449 is alight with brilliant young stars throughout. Researchers believe that this global burst of star formation came about because of NGC 4449’s interactions with its galactic neighbors. Because NGC 4449 is so close, it provides an excellent opportunity for Hubble to study how interactions between galaxies can influence the formation of new stars.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, E. Sabbi, D. Calzetti, A. Aloisi
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This image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows JO204, a ‘jellyfish galaxy’ so named for the bright tendrils of gas that appear in this image as drifting lazily below JO204’s bright central bulk. The galaxy lies almost 600 million light-years away in the constellation Sextans. Hubble observed JO204 as part of a survey performed with the intention of better understanding star formation under extreme conditions.
While the delicate ribbons of gas beneath JO204 may look like floating jellyfish tentacles, they are in fact the outcome of an intense astronomical process known as ram pressure stripping. Ram pressure is a particular type of pressure exerted on a body when it moves relative to a fluid. An intuitive example is the sensation of pressure you experience when you are standing in an intense gust of wind – the wind is a moving fluid, and your body feels pressure from it. An extension of this analogy is that your body will remain whole and coherent, but the more loosely bound things – like your hair and your clothes – will flap in the wind. The same is true for jellyfish galaxies. They experience ram pressure because of their movement against the intergalactic medium that fills the spaces between galaxies in a galaxy cluster. The galaxies experience intense pressure from that movement, and as a result their more loosely bound gas is stripped away. This gas is mostly the colder and denser gas in the galaxy – gas which, when stirred and compressed by the ram pressure, collapses and forms new stars in the jellyfish’s beautiful tendrils.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA; M. Gullieuszik and the GASP team
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2023/hubble-spots-a-ga...
This Hubble Space Telescope image shows how young, energetic, massive stars illuminate and sculpt their birthplace with powerful winds and searing ultraviolet radiation.
The giant red nebula (NGC 2014) and its smaller blue neighbor (NGC 2020) are part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located 163,000 light-years away. The image is nicknamed the “Cosmic Reef,” because it resembles an undersea world.
The sparkling centerpiece of NGC 2014 is a grouping of bright, hefty stars, each 10 to 20 times more massive than our Sun. The stars’ ultraviolet radiation heats the surrounding dense gas and unleash fierce winds of charged particles that blast away lower-density gas, forming the bubble-like structures seen on the right. The blue areas in NGC 2014 reveal the glow of oxygen, heated to nearly 20,000 degrees Fahrenheit by the blast of ultraviolet light. The cooler, red gas indicates the presence of hydrogen and nitrogen.
By contrast, the seemingly isolated blue nebula at lower left (NGC 2020) has been created by a solitary mammoth star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun. The blue gas was ejected by the star through a series of eruptive events during which it lost part of its outer envelope of material.
This image commemorates Hubble's 30th anniversary in orbit.
For more information about this image, visit: hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2020/news-2020-16
For Hubble anniversary podcasts, videos, interactives and more, visit: www.nasa.gov/content/hubbles-30th-anniversary
Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI
NGC 3718 is a highly disturbed spiral galaxy with an unusual, warped shape that looks a bit like a plump letter “s” from Earth, with a thin thread of dark dust snaking through it. Hubble’s view of this portion of NGC 3718 shows the sinuous, twisting dust lane in detail as it sweeps by the core of the galaxy and curves into the surrounding gas. Both the galaxy’s gas and dust lane are similarly distorted into this unique configuration.
The nucleus of the galaxy is extremely hard to detect in either visible or ultraviolet light because the prominent dust lane blocks much of those wavelengths, but it can be seen when viewing infrared light, which passes through dusty regions. NGC 3718, also called Arp 214, is thought to get its unusual shape from gravitational interaction with nearby galaxy NGC 3729, another spiral galaxy located approximately 150,000 light-years away. Among the features likely caused by this interaction are the line of reddish star formation that extends toward the 9 o’clock position, and the dark tendril of dust that reaches toward the 7 o’clock position.
Hubble took this image in infrared and visible light as part of a study of the central regions of disk-shaped galaxies with prominent bulges of stars in multiple environments. The study was meant to help clarify the relationship between the mass of supermassive black holes and the properties of galactic bulges; and to investigate star formation on a galactic scale, from the region around the nucleus to a galaxy’s disk.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and L. Ho (Peking University); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
For more information, visit: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-views-a-tw...
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A vast galaxy cluster lurks in the center of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Like a submerged sea monster causing waves on the surface, this cosmic leviathan can be identified by the distortions in spacetime around it. The cluster’s enormous mass curves spacetime, creating a gravitational lens that bends the light from distant galaxies beyond the cluster. The contorted streaks and arcs of light we see in this image are the result. A host of other galaxies surrounds the cluster, and a handful of foreground stars with tell-tale diffraction spikes are scattered throughout the image.
This particular galaxy cluster, called eMACS J1823.1+7822, lies almost nine billion light-years away in the constellation Draco. It is one of five exceptionally massive galaxy clusters Hubble explored with the aim of measuring the strengths of these gravitational lenses, which would provide insights into the distribution of dark matter in galaxy clusters. Strong gravitational lenses like eMACS J1823.1+7822 can help astronomers study distant galaxies by acting as vast natural telescopes which magnify objects that would otherwise be too faint or distant to resolve.
This multiwavelength image layers data from eight different filters and two different instruments: Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3. Both instruments can view astronomical objects in just a small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum using filters, which allow astronomers to image objects at precisely selected wavelengths. The combination of observations at different wavelengths lets astronomers develop a more complete picture of the structure, composition, and behavior of an object than visible light alone would reveal.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, H. Ebeling
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2023/hubble-captures-a...
Shreds of the colorful supernova remnant DEM L 190 seem to billow across the screen in this Hubble Space Telescope image. The delicate sheets and intricate filaments are debris from the cataclysmic death of a massive star that once lived in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. DEM L 190 – also known as LMC N49 – is the brightest supernova remnant in the Large Magellanic Cloud and lies approximately 160,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Dorado.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. Kulkarni, Y. Chu
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-homes-in-o...
This image from the Hubble Space Telescope looks at two spiral galaxies, collectively known as Arp 303. The pair, individually called IC 563 (bottom right) and IC 564 (top left), are 275 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Sextans.
The image holds data from two separate Hubble observations of Arp 303. The first used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to study the pair’s clumpy star-forming regions in infrared light. Galaxies like IC 563 and IC 564 are very bright at infrared wavelengths and host many bright star-forming regions.
The second used Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to take quick looks at bright, interesting galaxies across the sky. The observations filled gaps in Hubble’s archive and looked for promising candidates that Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, and other telescopes could study further.
The colors red, orange, and green represent infrared wavelengths taken with WFC3, and the color blue represents ACS visible light data.
Credit: NASA, ESA, K. Larson (STScI), and J. Dalcanton (University of Washington); Image Processing: G. Kober (NASA Goddard/Catholic University of America)
Visit Hubble's Galaxies: www.nasa.gov/content/discoveries-hubbles-galaxies
The galaxy JW100 (lower right) features prominently in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The streams of star-forming gas dripping from the disk of the galaxy like streaks of fresh paint are formed by a process called ram pressure stripping. Their resemblance to dangling tentacles led astronomers to refer to JW100 as a ‘jellyfish’ galaxy. JW100 is over 800 million light-years away, in the constellation Pegasus.
Ram pressure stripping occurs when galaxies encounter the diffuse gas that pervades galaxy clusters. As galaxies plow through this tenuous gas, it acts like a headwind, stripping gas and dust from the galaxy and creating the trailing streamers that prominently adorn JW100. The bright elliptical patches in the image are other galaxies in the cluster that hosts JW100.
Toward the top of this image are two bright blotches surrounded by a remarkably bright area of diffuse light. This is the core of IC 5338, the brightest galaxy in the galaxy cluster. IC 5338 is an elliptical galaxy with an extended halo, a type of galaxy called a cD galaxy. These galaxies likely grow by consuming smaller galaxies, so it’s not unusual for them to have multiple nuclei since it can take a long time for their cores to be absorbed. The bright points of light studding the galaxy’s outer fringes are a rich population of globular star clusters.
This observation took advantage of Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and its capabilities. The data is part of a sequence of observations designed to explore star formation in the tendrils of jellyfish galaxies. These tendrils represent star formation under extreme conditions and could help astronomers better understand the process of star formation elsewhere in the universe.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Gullieuszik and the GASP team
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2023/hubble-snaps-a-ga...
We've got our eyes on you! 👀
This striking image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captures more than meets the eye. There are three interacting galaxies here, not just two.
The two clearly defined galaxies are NGC 7733 (smaller, lower right) and NGC 7734 (larger, upper left). The third galaxy is currently referred to as NGC 7733N and is visible if you look carefully at the upper arm of NGC 7733.
Image description: Two spiral galaxies. Each glows brightly in the center, where a bar stretches from side to side. The upper one is rounder, and its arms form two thin rings. The lower galaxy is flatter and its arms make one outer ring; a dusty knot atop its upper arm marks out a third object. Gravity is pulling gas and dust together where the galaxies come close. A number of small galaxies surround them on a black background.
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Like a game of cosmic bumper cars, scientists think the early days of our solar system were a time of violent turmoil, with planetesimals, asteroids, and comets smashing together and pelting the Earth, Moon, and the other inner planets with debris. Now, in a historical milestone, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has directly imaged similar catastrophic collisions in a nearby planetary system around another star, Fomalhaut.
“This is certainly the first time I’ve ever seen a point of light appear out of nowhere in an exoplanetary system,” said principal investigator Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s absent in all of our previous Hubble images, which means that we just witnessed a violent collision between two massive objects and a huge debris cloud unlike anything in our own solar system today. Amazing!"
Just 25 light-years from Earth, Fomalhaut is one of the brightest stars in the night sky. Located in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, also known as the Southern Fish, it is more massive and brighter than the Sun and is encircled by several belts of dusty debris.
This composite Hubble Space Telescope image shows the debris ring and dust clouds cs1 and cs2 around the star Fomalhaut. Fomalhaut itself is masked out to allow the fainter features to be seen. Its location is marked by the white star.
Credit: Image: NASA, ESA, Paul Kalas (UC Berkeley); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
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The magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 2276 looks a bit lopsided in this Hubble Space Telescope snapshot. A bright hub of older yellowish stars normally lies directly in the center of most spiral galaxies. But the bulge in NGC 2276 looks offset to the upper left.
In reality, a neighboring galaxy to the right of NGC 2276 (NGC 2300, not seen here) is gravitationally tugging on its disk of blue stars, pulling the stars on one side of the galaxy outward to distort the galaxy's normal fried-egg appearance.
This sort of "tug of war" between galaxies that pass close enough to feel each other's gravitational pull is not uncommon in the universe. But, like snowflakes, no two close encounters look exactly alike.
In addition, newborn and short-lived massive stars form a bright, blue arm along the upper left edge of NGC 2276. They trace out a lane of intense star formation. This may have been triggered by a prior collision with a dwarf galaxy. It could also be due to NGC 2276 plowing into the superheated gas that lies among galaxies in galaxy clusters. This would compress the gas to precipitate into stars, and trigger a firestorm of starbirth.
The spiral galaxy lies 120 million light-years away, in the northern constellation Cepheus.
Credit: Image: NASA, ESA, STScI, Paul Sell (University of Florida);
Acknowledgement: Leo Shatz
For a view of NGC 2276 with its gravitational companion galaxy, visit: hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2021/029/01F60KJ7A72...
For more information, visit: hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2021/news-2021-029
NGC 2336 is the quintessential galaxy — big, beautiful, and blue — and it is captured here by the Hubble Space Telescope. The barred spiral galaxy stretches an immense 200,000 light-years across and is located approximately 100 million light-years away in the northern constellation of Camelopardalis (the Giraffe).
Its spiral arms glitter with young stars, visible in their bright blue light. In contrast, the redder central part of the galaxy is dominated by older stars.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, V. Antoniou
Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
For more information, visit: esahubble.org/images/potw2109a/
The orange-red "cobwebs" in this Hubble image are dusty clouds of sooty carbon engulfing the dying star CW Leonis. They were created from the outer layers of the star being thrown out into the inky black void. The carbon, cooked up through nuclear fusion in the star's interior, gives it a carbon-rich atmosphere. Blasting the carbon back into space provides raw material for the formation of future stars and planets. All known life on Earth is built around the carbon atom. Complex biological molecules consist of carbon atoms bonded with other common elements in the universe.
At a distance of 400 light-years from Earth, CW Leonis is the closest carbon star. This gives astronomers the chance to understand the interplay between the star and its surrounding, turbulent envelope. The complex inner structure of shells and arcs may be shaped by the star’s magnetic field. Detailed Hubble observations of CW Leonis taken over the last two decades also show the expansion of threads of ejected material around the star.
For more information: hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2021/059/01FJW7YS4R5...
Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, Toshiya Ueta (University of Denver), Hyosun Kim (KASI)
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals new details in Messier 82 (M82), home to brilliant stars whose light is shaded by sculptural clouds made of clumps and streaks of dust and gas. This image features the star-powered heart of the galaxy, located just 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear). Popularly known as the Cigar Galaxy, M82 is considered a nearby galaxy.
It’s no surprise that M82 is packed with stars. The galaxy forms stars 10 times faster than the Milky Way. Astronomers call it a starburst galaxy. The intense starbirth period that grips this galaxy gave rise to super star clusters in the galaxy’s heart. Each of these super star clusters holds hundreds of thousands of stars and is more luminous than a typical star cluster. Researchers used Hubble to home in on these massive clusters and reveal how they form and evolve.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. D. Vacca
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This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the glorious spiral galaxy NGC 5643, which is located roughly 40 million light-years away in the constellation Lupus, the Wolf. NGC 5643 is a grand design spiral, which refers to the galaxy’s symmetrical form with two large, winding spiral arms that are clearly visible. Bright-blue stars define the galaxy’s spiral arms, along with lacy reddish-brown dust clouds and pink star-forming regions.
As fascinating as the galaxy appears at visible wavelengths, some of NGC 5643’s most interesting features are invisible to the human eye. Ultraviolet and X-ray images and spectra of NGC 5643 show that the galaxy hosts an active galactic nucleus: an especially bright galactic core powered by a feasting supermassive black hole. When a supermassive black hole ensnares gas from its surroundings, the gas collects in a disk that heats up to hundreds of thousands of degrees. The superheated gas shines brightly across the electromagnetic spectrum, but especially at X-ray wavelengths.
NGC 5643’s active galactic nucleus isn’t the brightest source of X-rays in the galaxy, though. Researchers using ESA’s XMM-Newton discovered an even brighter X-ray-emitting object, called NGC 5643 X-1, on the galaxy’s outskirts. What could be a more powerful source of X-rays than a supermassive black hole? Surprisingly, the answer appears to be a much smaller black hole! While the exact identity of NGC 5643 X-1 is unknown, evidence points to a black hole that is about 30 times more massive than the Sun. Locked in an orbital dance with a companion star, the black hole ensnares gas from its stellar companion, creating a superheated disk that outshines the NGC 5643’s galactic core.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker
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This new Hubble Space Telescope image of IC 4271, also known as Arp 40, is a curious pair of spiral galaxies some 800 million light-years away. The smaller galaxy is superimposed on the larger one, which is a type of active galaxy called a Seyfert galaxy.
Seyfert galaxies are named for astronomer Carl K. Seyfert who, in 1943, published a paper about spiral galaxies with very bright emission lines. Today we know that about 10% of all galaxies may be Seyfert galaxies. They belong to the class of “active galaxies” – galaxies that have supermassive black holes at their centers accreting material, which releases vast amounts of radiation. The active cores of Seyfert galaxies are at their brightest when observed in light outside the visible spectrum. The larger galaxy in this pair is a Type II Seyfert galaxy, which means it is a very bright source of infrared and visible light.
The image uses data collected during Hubble observations designed to study the role of dust in shaping the energy distributions of low mass disk galaxies. The Hubble observations looked at six pairs of galaxies where one was in front of the other. The broad range of light that Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 is sensitive to, along with its resolution, allowed the researchers to map the foreground galaxy’s dust disk in fine detail across ultra-violet, visible, and infrared light. Because IC 4271 is a Type II Seyfert Galaxy, visible and infrared wavelengths of light dominate the image. The colors in this image are primarily visible light, while the color violet represents ultraviolet light and red represents near infrared light.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and B. Holwerda (University of Louisville Research Foundation, Inc.); Image processing: G. Kober (NASA Goddard/Catholic University of America)
Visit Hubble's Galaxies at www.nasa.gov/content/discoveries-hubbles-galaxies
The jellyfish galaxy, JO175, appears to hang suspended in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy lies over 650 million light-years from Earth in the appropriately named constellation Telescopium and was captured in crystal-clear detail by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. A handful of more distant galaxies are lurking throughout the scene, and a bright four-pointed star lies to the lower right side.
Jellyfish galaxies get their unusual name from the tendrils of star-forming gas and dust that trail behind them, just like the tentacles of a jellyfish. These bright tendrils contain clumps of star formation and give jellyfish galaxies a particularly striking appearance. Unlike their ocean-dwelling namesakes, jellyfish galaxies make their homes in galaxy clusters, and the pressure of the tenuous superheated plasma that permeates these galaxy clusters is what draws out the jellyfish galaxies’ distinctive tendrils.
Hubble recently completed a deep dive into jellyfish clusters, specifically the star-forming clumps of gas and dust that stud their tendrils. By studying the origins and fate of the stars in these clumps, astronomers hoped to better understand the processes underpinning star formation elsewhere in the universe. Interestingly, their research suggests that star formation in the disks of galaxies is similar to star formation in the extreme conditions found in the tendrils of jellyfish galaxies.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Gullieuszik and the GASP team
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2023/hubble-views-stri...
The highly irregular galaxy ESO 174-1, which resembles a lonely, hazy cloud against a backdrop of bright stars, dominates this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. ESO 174-1 lies around 11 million light-years from Earth and consists of a bright cloud of stars and a faint, meandering tendril of dark gas and dust.
This image is part of a collection of Hubble observations designed to better understand our nearby galactic neighbors. The observations aim to resolve the brightest stars and basic properties of every known galaxy within 10 megaparsecs. A parsec is a unit used by astronomers to measure the vast distances to other galaxies – 10 megaparsecs translates to 32 million light-years – and makes astronomical distances easier to handle. For example, the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is about 1.3 parsecs away. In everyday units this is a staggering 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km)!
The program to capture all of our neighboring galaxies was designed to use the 2-3% of Hubble time available between observations. It’s inefficient for Hubble to make back-to-back observations of objects that are in opposite parts of the sky. Observing programs like the one that captured ESO 174-1 fill the gaps between other observations. This way the telescope can move gradually from one observation to another, while still collecting data. These fill-in observing programs make the most out of every last minute of Hubble’s observing time.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Tully
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2023/hubble-checks-in-...
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the globular star cluster NGC 2419. Globular clusters are both beautiful and fascinating. They are spherical groups of stars that orbit the center of a galaxy, and in the case of NGC 2419, that galaxy is our own Milky Way. NGC 2419 is around 300,000 light-years from the solar system, in the constellation Lynx.
The stars populating globular clusters are very similar because they formed at roughly the same time. Astronomers can determine a star’s relative age by its chemical makeup, a property called its metallicity. Because stars in a globular cluster all formed at around the same time, they tend to display similar properties. Astronomers believed this similarity included their stellar helium content. They thought that all stars in a globular cluster would contain similar amounts of helium.
However, Hubble’s observations of NGC 2419 revealed that this is not always the case. This globular cluster holds two separate populations of red giant stars, and one is unusually helium rich. NGC 2419’s stars hold other elements that vary too. In particular, their nitrogen content varies. To make things even more interesting, the helium-rich stars are predominantly in the center of the globular cluster and are rotating. Hubble’s observations raised questions about the formation of globular clusters; did these two drastically different groups of stars form together? Or did this globular cluster come into being by a different route entirely?
Text Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. Larsen et al.
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2023/hubble-spies-a-mu...
This Hubble Space Telescope image shows NGC 1023, one of the nearest, massive lenticular galaxies to Earth at about 36 million light-years away. Lenticular galaxies get their names from their edge-on appearance that resembles a lens. They are intermediate galaxies between ellipticals and spirals. Lenticular galaxies have a large central bulge and a flattened disk like spirals, but no spiral arms. Like ellipticals, lenticular galaxies don’t have much gas and dust, and also contain mainly old stars.
NGC 1023 is not alone in this image. The fuzzy blue patch to the lower left of the galaxy is NGC 1023a, an irregular satellite galaxy of its large lenticular neighbor. The galaxy pair was part of a study that looked at multiple star systems and star clusters in galaxies beyond our own Milky Way. The researchers found 81 long-lived open star clusters (loosely bound groups of a few tens to a few hundred stars) in NGC 1023’s disk as well as 27 young blue star clusters. Half of the young blue star clusters are associated with the satellite galaxy, while the rest are spatially associated with the neutral hydrogen gas that surrounds the large lenticular galaxy.
The image uses data from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Additional gap-filling data was provided by the Pan-STARRS collaboration. The color blue represents visible blue light while the color orange represents near infrared light.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Sivakoff (University of Alberta); Image processing: G. Kober (NASA Goddard/Catholic University of America)
Visit Hubble's Galaxies at www.nasa.gov/content/discoveries-hubbles-galaxies
This celestial cloudscape captures the colorful region in the Orion Nebula surrounding the Herbig-Haro object HH 505. Herbig-Haro objects are luminous regions surrounding newborn stars that form when stellar winds or jets of gas spew from these infant stars creating shockwaves that collide with nearby gas and dust at high speeds. The outflows are visible as gracefully curving structures at the top and bottom of this image. Their interaction with the large-scale flow of gas and dust from the core of the nebula distorts them into sinuous curves.
The Orion Nebula is a dynamic region of dust and gas where thousands of stars are forming. It is the closest region of massive star formation to Earth, making it one of the most scrutinized areas of the night sky and often a target for the Hubble Space Telescope.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Bally; Acknowledgment: M. H. Özsaraç
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-peers-at-c...
This Hubble Space Telescope image captures an unusual close-knit collection of five galaxies, called the Hickson Compact Group 40.
This menagerie includes three spiral-shaped galaxies, an elliptical galaxy, and a lenticular (lens-like) galaxy. Somehow, these different galaxies crossed paths in their evolution to create an exceptionally crowded and eclectic galaxy sampler.
Caught in a leisurely gravitational dance, the whole group is so crowded that it could fit within a region of space that is less than twice the diameter of our Milky Way’s stellar disk.
Though such cozy galaxy groupings can be found in the heart of huge galaxy clusters, these galaxies are notably isolated in their own small patch of the universe, in the direction of the constellation Hydra.
One possibility is that there’s a lot of dark matter (an unknown and invisible form of matter) associated with these galaxies. If they come close together, then the dark matter can form a big cloud within which the galaxies are orbiting. As the galaxies plow through the dark matter they feel a frictional force due to its gravitational effects. This slows their motion and makes the galaxies lose energy so they fall together.
Therefore, this snapshot catches the galaxies at a very special moment in their lifetimes. In about 1 billion years they will eventually collide and merge to form a giant elliptical galaxy.
Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI
Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
For more information, visit: hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2022-012
This observation from the Hubble Space Telescope showcases Arp 86, a peculiar pair of interacting galaxies which lies roughly 220 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. Arp 86 is composed of the two galaxies NGC 7752 and NGC 7753 — NGC 7753 is the large spiral galaxy dominating this image, and NGC 7752 is its smaller companion. The diminutive companion galaxy almost appears to be attached to NGC 7753, and it is this peculiarity that has earned the designation “Arp 86” — signifying that the galaxy pair appears in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies compiled by the astronomer Halton Arp in 1966.
The gravitational squabble between the two galaxies is doomed to end catastrophically for NGC 7752. It will eventually either be flung out into intergalactic space or be entirely engulfed by its far larger neighbor.
Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA, Dark Energy Survey, J. Dalcanton
For more information, visit: esahubble.org/images/potw2142a/
The teeming stars of the globular cluster NGC 6544 glisten in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This cluster of tightly bound stars lies more than 8,000 light-years away from Earth and is, like all globular clusters, a densely populated region of tens of thousands of stars.
This image of NGC 6544 combines data from two of Hubble’s instruments, the Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3, as well as two separate astronomical observations. The first observation was designed to find a visible counterpart to the radio pulsar discovered in NGC 6544. A pulsar is the rapidly spinning remnant of a dead star, emitting twin beams of electromagnetic radiation like a vast astronomical lighthouse. This pulsar rotates particularly quickly, and astronomers turned to Hubble to help determine how this object evolved in NGC 6544.
The second observation which contributed data to this image was also designed to find the visible counterparts of objects detected at other electromagnetic wavelengths. Instead of matching up sources to a pulsar, however, astronomers used Hubble to search for the counterparts of faint X-ray sources. Their observations could help explain how clusters like NGC 6544 change over time.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Lewin, F. R. Ferraro
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2023/hubble-glimpses-a...