The Hubble telescope has captured a spiral galaxy “face-on,” with pink and orange bubbles depicting various star formations.
The image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, a joint project of NASA and the European Space Agency, was shared on Monday and shows the spiral galaxy up close from around 30 million light years away.
It lies in the constellation Sculptor and, according to the ESA, has an almost “face-on” orientation to the Earth.
“Face-on” means that the galaxy is oriented so that it appears disc-shaped and circular from where we are on Earth. However, if a faraway galaxy has a squashed or oval-shaped appearance, it is described as “edge-on.”
Face-on means we can see the galaxy in all its glory, with its bright core.
ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Chandar, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST team
This galaxy, also known as IC 5332, is known for being symmetrical in appearance, which makes it a beautiful sight to behold in images. Spiral galaxies are defined by their stars and gas clouds, which appear in multiple spiral arms.
Galaxies look completely different from Earth, depending on whether they are face-on or edge-on.
“IC 5332 is designated as an SABc-type galaxy in the De Vaucouleurs system of galaxy classification,” a statement from ESA Hubble, posted alongside the photo, read. “The ‘S’ is straightforward, identifying it as a spiral galaxy, which it clearly is, given the well-defined arms of bright stars and darker dust that curl outwards from the galaxy’s dense and bright core. The ‘AB’ is a little more complex. It means that the galaxy is weakly barred, which refers to the shape of the galaxy’s centre.”
ESA Hubble said that this galaxy is quite an “intermediate spiral galaxy on many fronts.”
“Weakly barred, with quite loosely wound arms, and almost completely face-on,” it explained.
“The majority of spiral galaxies do not spiral out from a single point, but rather from an elongated bar-type structure. SAB galaxies — which are also known as intermediate spiral galaxies — do not have a clear bar-shape at their core, but also do not spiral out from a single point, instead falling somewhere in between. The lowercase ‘c’ describes how tightly wound the spiral arms are: ‘a’ would indicate very tightly wound, and ‘d’ very loosely wound.”
The Hubble Space Telescope is a large telescope in low Earth orbit. It was launched in 1990 and faces toward space, capturing images of many different wonders of the solar system and far away galaxies.
Pictures captured by the telescope are versatile and detailed, which allows astronomers to discover more about the solar system, as well as how galaxies form and evolve.
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