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NASA’s Hubble Spies Spiral’s Edge

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Explore Hubble

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NASA’s Hubble Spies Spiral’s Edge

An edge-on spiral galaxy. Its rusty-brown dust lanes bisect the galaxy lengthwise. Bright-blue points dot the galaxy and seem to be more dense on its left side. A bright foreground star shines just to the left of the galaxy's center. The background is black and dotted with distant galaxies and a smattering of foreground stars, which are easily identified by their diffraction spikes.

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features the edge-on, intermediate spiral galaxy NGC 1827. Its rusty-brown dust lanes bisect the galaxy lengthwise. Look for distant galaxies that dot the black background, while a smattering of foreground stars are easily identified by their diffraction spikes.

NASA, ESA, Michael Jones (California Institute of Technology); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features the edge-on, intermediate spiral galaxy NGC 1827, located roughly 37 million light-years away in the constellation Columba, the Dove. Hubble captured the image as part of a survey looking at 260 satellite galaxies around 22 Milky Way-like host galaxies within a radius of about 32 million light-years from Earth. Hubble has already observed 111 of these satellite galaxies. The remaining galaxies will take an additional 149 Hubble orbits, one orbit for each galaxy, to observe.

The image, taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, reveals bright-blue regions along the galaxy’s disk dotted with dark dust lanes where new stars are likely forming. A bright foreground star appears just to the left of the galaxy’s bright central bulge but is located between us and the galaxy. Its four diffraction spikes are the result of light bending around the internal supports that hold Hubble’s secondary mirror.

Low-mass galaxies like the ones in this Hubble observing program provide a way to test the predictions of cosmological models on small scales, which struggle to match observations. The data Hubble gathers will help us better understand and characterize the properties of low-mass galaxies in Milky Way-like systems, allowing researchers to refine cosmological models.