A brand new Hubble Space Telescope image shines a highlight on a faraway snake-like galaxy whose swirling arms feature recent and old stars.
Light from this galaxy began its journey to Earth roughly 80 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs died out. The image, released as a part of NASA’s Hubble Galaxy Week from Oct. 2 to Oct. 7, features NGC 1087, a spiral galaxy residing within the constellation Cetus. This particular patch of sky is known as after a mythical Greek sea monster and is home to the favored Aquarius and Pisces constellations.
The broken tendrils of red light indicate cold molecular gas, which is the raw ingredient from which recent stars form and grow across eons. Comparatively, the blue regions host hot stars formed up to now. Astronomers think lots of them are of a rare class of highly unstable stars called Wolf-Rayet.
Despite all of the shine, the galaxy has only one known star that went supernova in August 1995, which can also be when astronomers noticed a temporary spike within the galaxy’s brightness.
NGC 1087’s most notable feature, nevertheless, is its bright-white starry bar at the middle of its twisted trails of gas. Here, surprising hints of birthing stars make the galaxy an exciting object for astronomers to check. The bar itself is analogous but much shorter in comparison with the central bar of our very own Milky Way.
Our location throughout the Milky Way makes it very difficult to exactly estimate the scale and shape of this central bar, so galaxies like NGC 1087 that sport similar features are priceless targets to watch.
When seen from our skies, NGC 1087 may be spotted just south of the celestial equator, which implies it’s visible from each the northern and southern hemispheres.
Based on a statement accompanying the newly released image, astronomers use Hubble, which launched to Earth orbit in 1990, to study what happens to pockets of gas after stars form inside them (amongst many other projects).