Hubble captures a galaxy similar to a bright snow globe to celebrate the Christmas season

2023-12-20 19:57:01

MADRID, 20 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) –

He NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the galaxy known as UGC 8091 which resembles a shiny festive snow globe.

With a dazzling array of wavelengths of light captured by the filters of Hubble’s main scientific instruments, The millions of stars in this galaxy are being explored more deeply than everas reported by the ESA.

UGC 8091, also known as GR 8, It is located about seven million light years from Earth, in the constellation of Virgo. Unlike other galaxies whose stars take on a more ordered appearance, astronomers classify UGC 8091 as an irregular galaxy.

The stars that make up this celestial gathering look more like a tangle of bright string lights than a galaxy. Some irregular galaxies are thought to have become entangled due to tumultuous internal activity, while others are known to have formed by interactions with neighboring galaxies.. The result is a class of galaxies with a wide range of sizes and shapes, including the diffuse scattering of stars that is this galaxy.

In particular, UGC 8091 is an irregular dwarf galaxy, meaning it only contains about a billion stars. That’s a huge amount of light, but not for a galaxy, since the Milky Way is believed to encompass more than 100 billion stars. while other galaxies may have trillions.

Dwarf galaxies often orbit larger galaxies, and their low masses make them vulnerable to being disturbed and consumed by their larger neighbors, a process that produces twisted irregular dwarfs like UGC 8091. This type of galaxy is thought to have similar characteristics to hugely ancient and distant galaxies seen by astronomers in deep-field images.

Se It is hoped that research into the composition of dwarf galaxies and their stars, particularly their low metallicity, Help uncover evolutionary links between these ancient galaxies and more modern galaxies like the Milky Way.

To do this, astronomers have been carefully examining the multicolored stars of UGC 8091. Different features of the galaxy can be detected by using filters to restrict the light entering Hubble’s instruments to very specific wavelength ranges.

Then, Those filtered images can be recombined to create a full color image: twelve amazing filters combine to produce this imagewith the contribution of light from the mid-ultraviolet to the red end of the visible spectrum.

The blooming red spots represent light emitted by excited hydrogen molecules in hot, energetic stars that have formed in recent bursts.. The other flares shown in this image are a mix of older stars.

The data used in this image dates from 2006 to 2021 and was taken by two of Hubble’s most advanced instruments: the Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys. Among other things, the observing programs aimed to investigate the role of low-mass galaxies, such as UGC 8091, in the reionization of the early Universe, and to examine the results of star formation in low-metallicity galaxies.