Posts Tagged hubble

Image courtesy ESA/NASA

I thought I scheduled this post already — I guess I just thought about it REALLY LOUDLY. Saw this image on National Geographic, get a big version on the ESA Hubble website.

A galaxy slightly smaller than our own Milky Way is getting its arm twisted, and a cosmic bully may be to blame.

As seen in a picture released in August by scientists with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, one of galaxy NGC 2146′s arms is bent at a 45-degree angle, such that the dense limb has looped in front of the galaxy’s core, as seen from Earth.

The most likely explanation is that the gravity of an unidentified nearby galaxy is disturbing NGC 2146′s arm, causing the galaxy to warp.

I suppose one could construe that most spiral galaxies resemble holiday wreaths, but this is a particularly sparkly, full wreath. So there. Enjoy your Wednesday — and the shortest day of the year!

Resembling festive lights on a holiday wreath, this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the nearby spiral galaxy M74 is an iconic reminder of the impending season. Bright knots of glowing gas light up the spiral arms, indicating a rich environment of star formation.

Messier 74, also called NGC 628, is a stunning example of a grand-design spiral galaxy that is viewed by Earth observers nearly face-on. Its perfectly symmetrical spiral arms emanate from the central nucleus and are dotted with clusters of young blue stars and glowing pink regions of ionized hydrogen (hydrogen atoms that have lost their electrons). These regions of star formation show an excess of light at ultraviolet wavelengths.

Tracing along the spiral arms are winding dust lanes that also begin very near the galaxy’s nucleus and follow along the length of the spiral arms. M74 is located roughly 32 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Pisces, the Fish. It is the dominant member of a small group of about half a dozen galaxies, the M74 galaxy group. In its entirety, it is estimated that M74 is home to about 100 billion stars, making it slightly smaller than our Milky Way.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

Credit: Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA; Processing - Martin Pugh

I can’t quite decide what this looks like. Some sort of winged creature? A UFO (complete with antenna up-top?) Two overlapping galaxies (for the imaginatively-challenged?) You decide!

NGC 3314 is actually two large spiral galaxies which just happen to almost exactly line up. The foreground spiral is viewed nearly face-on, its pinwheel shape defined by young bright star clusters. But against the glow of the background galaxy, dark swirling lanes of interstellar dust appear to dominate the face-on spiral’s structure. The dust lanes are surprisingly pervasive, and this remarkable pair of overlapping galaxies is one of a small number of systems in which absorption of light from beyond a galaxy’s own stars can be used to directly explore its distribution of dust. NGC 3314 is about 140 million light-years (background galaxy) and 117 million light-years (foreground galaxy) away in the multi-headed constellation Hydra. The background galaxy would span nearly 70,000 light-years at its estimated distance. A synthetic third channel was created to construct this dramatic new composite of the overlapping galaxies from two color image data in the Hubble Legacy Archive.

I love the mixture of dark and light in this beautiful image of M64, the Sleeping Beauty Galaxy. (I also love the name, though I can’t find any information on why it’s called that.)

The Sleeping Beauty galaxy may appear peaceful at first sight but it is actually tossing and turning. In an unexpected twist, recent observations have shown that the gas in the outer regions of this photogenic spiral is rotating in the opposite direction from all of the stars! Collisions between gas in the inner and outer regions are creating many hot blue stars and pink emission nebula. The above image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2001 and released in 2004. The fascinating internal motions of M64, also cataloged as NGC 4826, are thought to be the result of a collision between a small galaxy and a large galaxy where the resultant mix has not yet settled down.

I’ve uploaded this beauty for your downloading pleasure; click on the above image to see it at full resolution. For all that we humans tend to focus on the bad things, there sure are a lot of beautiful things in the universe. Stars and galaxies hang like jewels above us, and hidden treasures are buried beneath us.

Big, beautiful spiral galaxy M101 is one of the last entries in Charles Messier’s famous catalog, but definitely not one of the least. About 170,000 light-years across, this galaxy is enormous, almost twice the size of our own Milky Way galaxy. M101 was also one of the original spiral nebulae observed by Lord Rosse’s large 19th century telescope, the Leviathan of Parsontown. This mosaic of M101 was assembled from Hubble Legacy Archive data. Additional ground-based data was included to further define the telltale reddish emission from atomic hydrogen gas in this gorgeous galaxy’s star forming regions. The sharp image shows stunning features in the galaxy’s face-on disk of stars and dust along with background galaxies, some visible right through M101 itself. Also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101 lies within the boundaries of the northern constellation Ursa Major, about 25 million light-years away.

Credit: Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA; processing and additional imaging – Robert Gendler.

Released yesterday for Hubble’s 21st anniversary, this image of interacting galaxies looks like a rose. (There’s a much longer explanation of this image, if you’re interested. Pretty neat stuff!)

To celebrate the 21st anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s deployment into space, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., pointed Hubble’s eye at an especially photogenic pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. The larger of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, has a disk that is distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. This image is a composite of Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 data taken on December 17, 2010, with three separate filters that allow a broad range of wavelengths covering the ultraviolet, blue, and red portions of the spectrum.