Hubble’s 23-Year Look at a Warped Spiral Galaxy Reveals Hidden Secrets

UGC 10043 is a spiral galaxy seen edge-on, featuring a distinct dust lane and a prominent bulge that suggests interaction with a nearby dwarf galaxy. Captured by Hubble’s long-term data collection, its images provide deep insights into its structure and formation.

What kind of astronomical object is this? At first glance, it doesn’t resemble the typical galaxies, nebulae, star clusters, or galaxy clusters often captured by Hubble. Surprisingly, it’s a spiral galaxy called UGC 10043 — viewed edge-on from our perspective. Located approximately 150 million light-years away in the constellation Serpens, UGC 10043 is a relatively rare example of a spiral galaxy seen from the side.

In this orientation, the galaxy’s disc appears as a sharp, thin line cutting through space, accented by a striking dust lane. This dust, distributed along the spiral arms, looks especially dense and cloud-like when observed edge-on. Behind this dust, faint glimmers of light reveal active star-forming regions within the arms. Perhaps most striking is the galaxy’s glowing, egg-shaped central bulge, extending well above and below the disc. This bulge, a common feature of spiral galaxies, contains stars orbiting above and below the plane of the disc, though it’s rarely so prominent in typical galaxy images.

UGC 10043’s unusually large bulge relative to its disc may result from gravitational interactions with a nearby dwarf galaxy, from which it appears to be siphoning material. This interaction could also explain the warped shape of the disc, which bends upward at one end and downward at the other.

Like most of the full-colour Hubble images released by ESA/Hubble, this image is a composite, made up of several individual snapshots taken by Hubble at different times and capturing different wavelengths of light. You can see the exact images used in the sidebar on this page. A notable aspect of this image is that the two sets of Hubble data used were collected 23 years apart, in 2000 and 2023! Hubble’s longevity doesn’t just afford us the ability to produce new and better images of old targets; it also provides a long-term archive of data which only becomes more and more useful to astronomers.

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