This galaxy, Messier 90, appears blue because it’s traveling toward us

By Georgina Torbet May 26, 2019

Messier 90, a beautiful spiral galaxy located roughly 60 million light-years from the Milky Way in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin). The black boxes in the top left are the result of the configuration of the sensors in the camera. ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Sargent et al.

A new Hubble image has been released showing Messier 90, 60 million light-years away in the Virgo Cluster. It is located in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin), which is part of the Virgo Supercluster which includes our galaxy.

An unusual feature of Messier 90 is that it is traveling towards the Milky Way, not away from it. Most galaxies are traveling apart due to the expansion of the universe, so other galaxies appear to be moving away from us. But Messier 90 is heading in our direction; a rare example of bucking the galactic trend.

We know that Messier 90 is traveling towards us because of the way its light appears. When galaxies are traveling away from us, the wavelengths of light they produce is stretched, making the light appear more towards the red end of the spectrum in a process called the Doppler effect. This means most galaxies give off light which is redshifted. But in the case of Messier 90, the light we detect from it is shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum, or blueshifted. That means light waves are being compressed as the galaxy comes closer to us.

Astronomers believe the galaxy is currently traveling towards us due to the huge mass of the Virgo Cluster, which pulls smaller galaxies into eccentric orbits which travel sometimes closer to us and sometimes further away.

This image of Messier 90 was created from a wide range of light wavelengths, including infrared, ultraviolet, and visible light. The data was gathered by Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) which captured images from Hubble between 1994 and 2010.

The reason this image has a black section in the top left corner is to do with how the WFPC2 worked. The camera consisted of four light detectors, each trained on a slightly different area of space with some small overlap between them. There were three wide-field sensors in an L-shape and a smaller, higher resolution sensor in the remaining corner. As the higher resolution camera captured images at a greater magnification, the image it produced had to be scaled down in order to fit with the other three images. The result is images like the one above, with a chunk missing from the top corner.

The WFPC2 has since been superseded by the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) which captures full images over a wide range of wavelengths.

Topics

Georgina Torbet

Space Writer

Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Entertainment

AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying

Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Mobile

4 simple pieces of tech that helped me run my first marathon

Garmin Forerunner 955 Solar displaying pace information.

The fitness world is littered with opportunities to buy tech aimed at enhancing your physical performance. No matter your sport of choice or personal goals, there's a deep rabbit hole you can go down. It'll cost plenty of money, but the gains can be marginal -- and can honestly just be a distraction from what you should actually be focused on. Running is certainly susceptible to this.

A few months ago, I ran my first-ever marathon. It was an incredible accomplishment I had no idea I'd ever be able to reach, and it's now going to be the first of many I run in my lifetime. And despite my deep-rooted history in tech, and the endless opportunities for being baited into gearing myself up with every last product to help me get through the marathon, I went with a rather simple approach.