Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys captured this detailed image of the galaxy NGC 5253, highlighting regions of active star formation at the core of a distant galaxy.
This newly released Hubble Space Telescope image shows the compressed blue dwarf galaxy NGC 5253 as seen through the High Resolution Channel (HRC) of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).
ACS is a third-generation Hubble science instrument, installed in 2002 as part of the 3B maintenance mission. It originally had three sub-devices or "channels". The wide field channel, as its name and ACS's name suggests, is used to survey wide fields of distant and faint galaxies, including Hubble's famous very deep field, while the sun-blind channel is optimized for viewing UV light emitted by planets like Jupiter by blocking sunlight. Both of these are still running.
HRC is the third channel, designed to look closely and in great detail at the center of celestial objects such as the centers of galaxies, star clusters and star-forming regions. Its high resolution allowed astronomers to distinguish many stars in a small area and probe dense areas in depth. NGC 5253, a rapidly star-forming galaxy full of unusual star clusters, is a perfect target for ACS with HRC. This image shows the galactic core in detail, with super star clusters lurking among the dark dust clouds.
HRC only operated for five years, between the installation of ACS and electronics failures in 2007 that shut it down. ACS was partially repaired during Hubble's last maintenance mission in 2009, but HRC could not be returned to service. High-resolution close-up images of the cores of galaxies like this one are, therefore, rare.
Here it is worth noting that professional astronomers hardly ever sit in front of a telescope, but have become big data operators in front of the photo archive of telescopes on the ground and in space, with the entire huge amount of observations at their disposal. This is why there are still many photographs of the Hubble Space Telescope that have not been studied for many years.
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