Hubble reveals the "lost galaxy" as a vibrant spiral with newly formed stars and glowing clouds of cosmic energy.
This Hubble Space Telescope image highlights the spiral galaxy NGC 4535, a vast system of stars located about 50 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. That's far beyond anything in our galaxy, but to astronomers, NGC 4535 is in the nearby universe. NGC 4535 has been nicknamed the "Lost Galaxy" because it appears very faint when viewed with a small home telescope, making it difficult to study from the ground.
The Hubble Space Telescope is particularly well-suited to observing such galaxies. Its 2.40-meter primary mirror diameter allows it to collect much more light than smaller instruments. This capability allows it to locate faint objects and reveal fine details, including its spiral arms and the central bar, an elongated, densely packed region of stars that helps shape the galaxy's structure.
Young star clusters and glowing gas clouds
One of the most striking things about this image is the abundance of young star clusters along the spiral arms of NGC 4535. Star clusters are groups of stars that formed together from the same cloud of gas and dust. Many of these clusters glow a light blue, indicating that their stars are very hot and relatively young.
Surrounding many of these blue stars are glowing pink clouds called H II regions ("H-2" - ionized hydrogen). These clouds are made of hydrogen gas that has been energized by intense radiation from nearby massive stars. When this radiation heats the gas, it causes the clouds to glow, allowing them to be seen over vast distances. The presence of H II regions indicates active star formation, meaning that new stars are still being formed within the galaxy.
Massive stars play a dramatic role in shaping their surroundings. They flood nearby space with high-energy radiation, generate stellar winds that push nearby material outward, and eventually end their lives in a supernova explosion. Each of these processes moves and reshapes the gas around them, influencing when and where the next generation of stars will form.
Mapping star formation in nearby galaxies
The image is also based on data from a large observational effort aimed at cataloging approximately 50,000 H II regions in nearby galaxies where there is active star formation. Studying such a large number of regions in different galaxies will allow astronomers to compare how star formation occurs in a wide variety of environments.
This image includes observations from the PHANGS program, a large research project focused on understanding the interaction between young stars and cold gas, the raw material for future star formation. The image adds important new information by capturing the intense red glow of nebulae orbiting massive stars in the first millions of years of their lives. This additional detail allows scientists to create a clearer picture of how galaxies like NGC 4535 evolve over time.
More of the topic in Hayadan:
2 תגובות
This article supports the neural theory that states that stellar matter is formed from the combination of amounts of passive matter and energy.
The element gold is formed from a certain combination of passive time and energy, and the element carbon is formed from a different combination of matter and energy. Infinite space is filled with separate passive time and separate energy, and is the place where they are created. It is also the place where they explode and disappear, and then they give up their passive time and energy to infinite space. This is an eternal process, according to the neural theory.
Cosmologist Avinoam Aba.
If the galaxy is 50 million light years away, it cannot be that the stars "just formed."
They are at least 50 million years old…