The peculiar spiral galaxy ESO 415-19, which is located approximately 450 million light-years away from Earth, stretches lazily across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. While the center of this object resembles a regular spiral galaxy, long streams of stars stretch out from the galactic core like bizarrely elongated spiral arms. These are tidal streams caused by some chance interaction in the galaxy’s past, and give ESO 415-19 a distinctly peculiar appearance.
ESO 415-19’s peculiarity made it a great target for Hubble. This observation comes from an ongoing campaign to explore the Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, a menagerie of some of the weirdest and most wonderful galaxies that the Universe has to offer. These galaxies range from bizarre lonesome galaxies to spectacularly interacting galaxy pairs, triplets, and even quintets. These space oddities are spread throughout the night sky, which means that Hubble can spare a moment to observe them as it moves between other observational targets.
This particular observation lies in a part of the night sky contained by the Fornax constellation. This constellation was also the site of a particularly important Hubble observation; the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (see image above). Creating the Ultra Deep Field required almost a million seconds of Hubble time, and captured nearly 10,000 galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. Just as climate scientists can recreate the planet’s atmospheric history from ice cores, astronomers can use deep field observations to explore slices of the Universe’s history from the present all the way to when the Universe was only 800 million years old!
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5 Comments
So cool! Imagine living in that wispy arm and being able to see and study the whole of your home galaxy.
Mindblowing!!! Actually your mind may never be able to comprehend the vastness of what we are seeing (or not seeing)
Rather SoulSearching ⁉️ Perhaps by astral travel may we learn more of what we are looking at.
For photos of this kind, I also suggest displaying a unit of measurement (e.g. light year). I think it would be very instructive!
Wow!
It is just impossible that out of so many galaxies with multiple planetary systems in it, the life only emerged on Earth. Not to mentioned how young and unstable this planet is, with things like ice age, biblical flooding etc. We know water is found on almost every planet in the solar system already. What about other planets then, which are more stable and older? The life not only exists but flourish I’d say.
Chances we are alone in the universe are low. Very low. Almost impossible.
As a matter of fact, we already have a scripture that confirms this – Vedas. With details on number of worlds, planets, species. And time.
The vastness of space is amassing and the many shapes of the galaxies are beautiful. I am sure life exists elsewhere. Intelligent life survival has been a great miracle and that may be the most important thing that is rare here. The universe is a brutal by nature and surviving it is the lucky thing. Earth has had 5 E.L.E that took out most living things on the planet. Evolution and surviving to see this is a human condition, no other creatures on the planet observe the stars like mankind. We are fortunate to alive at this time of discovery to see such wonders.