NASA released six new, shimmering images of galaxies spotted by the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope last week. Many of them millions of light-years away from Earth, the images help researchers better understand star formation and evolution, supernovae and other cosmic phenomena.
Hubble has made about 1.5 million observations in the more than three decades that it’s been trained on the cosmos, according to NASA. The telescope is designed to take in visible and ultraviolet light, plus a short stretch of the infrared spectrum.
Hubble orbits our planet from 340 miles above the surface. It’s capable of capturing light emitted from celestial objects that would otherwise be thwarted by Earth’s atmosphere and rendered unavailable to telescopes that make their observations from the ground, the agency said.
Different types of light offer different clues about distant celestial objects. Visible and ultraviolet light reveal closer phenomena, while infrared offers a glimpse at more distant objects, according to NASA. The James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s latest counterpart, takes in mid- and near-infrared light, which allows it to see some of the oldest and most distant phenomena in the universe.
Located in the Cephus constellation, this intermediate spiral galaxy — dubbed NGC 6951 (right side) — has had a long and storied past. It reached peak star formation around 800 million years ago but went quiet for 300 million years before it once again started generating new stars, according to NASA. The galaxy is 78 million light-years away from Earth and can be spotted from the Northern Hemisphere.
This barred spiral galaxy — dubbed NGC 1087 (left side) — is located in the constellation Cetus. The image’s various colors tell a story: The red indicates the cold molecular gas from which stars emerge, the pink signals areas where new stars are forming and the blue regions show “hot, young stars formed earlier in the lifetime of this galaxy,” according to NASA. It’s 80 million light-years away from Earth and is visible across the planet.
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Credits : https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/galaxies-far-far-away-get-the-spotlight-in-these-new-hubble-images
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