Hubble’s latest look into deep space is a real dazzler.
Image: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et
Say hello to NGC 4680. This distant galaxy — it’s more than 350 light-years away from Earth — is captured in beautiful detail and color by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3. NASA shared the freshly created image on Friday, highlighting the “neighboring” galaxies visible in the image (one on the right side of the frame and one at the bottom).
Let’s not let those other galaxies steal the show, though. NGC 4680 is an interesting one because of how difficult it is to classify. It looks a bit like a spiral galaxy, and it may have more confidently been one long ago, but as the description points out, it’s often referred to as a lenticular galaxy.
Spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, tend do have clearly defined arms swirling and bending around a bright center (a supermassive black hole). Elliptical are roughly circular or oval in shape, and they also form around a supermassive black hole. But they’re short on the gases and dust that help to form stars (and which also give spiral galaxies their more defined look).
Galaxies aren’t static stellar objects; they’re in flux always, shaped by the physical forces that rule our universe. And it’s believed that spiral galaxies, over time, transform into elliptical galaxies. It’s during the middle period of the transformation that lenticular galaxies are formed.
You can probably get a sense of where that classification comes from in the above image. The arms are hazier and more melded together than you might see with a textbook example of a spiral galaxy. One of the outer arms even seems to dissolve into the surrounding space. If the theory that spiral galaxies evolve into elliptical galaxies is accurate, you may be seeing the early stages of that transformation happening here.