See the ‘grand design’ of spiral galaxy M99 in this Hubble image

By Georgina Torbet Published May 8, 2022

The swirling spiral of the elegant galaxy M99 is on display in this week’s image from the Hubble Space Telescope. As a prototypical spiral galaxy, like our Milky Way, M99 has the classical rotating disk of stars, gas, and dust, which is concentrated and bright in the center and reaches out into space with spiral arms. But his particular galaxy isn’t just any spiral galaxy — it is a “grand design” spiral galaxy, a classification given to the neatest and most orderly spiral galaxies whose arms are particularly prominent and well-defined.

The magnificent spiral galaxy M99 fills the frame in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. — The magnificent spiral galaxy M99 fills the frame in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. M99 – which lies roughly 42 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices – is a “grand design” spiral galaxy, so-called because of the well-defined, prominent spiral arms visible in this image. ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Kasliwal, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team

The galaxy M99 is located in the constellation of Coma Berenices and is around 42 million light-years from Earth. As well as being visually stunning, this galaxy is an interesting target of research and has been imaged by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument twice, for two different research projects.

Recommended Videos

The first project M99 was observed for is one which looked at the difference between two types of explosions that can occur at the end of a star’s life: Novae and supernovae. Supernovae are the more dramatic, famous events, in which massive stars run out of fuel and explode in huge, bright events which can send out shockwaves and leave behind distinctive remnants. The less famous novae are dimmer events that happen when white dwarfs in a binary system with a larger star suck off layers of matter from that star’s outer shell.

However, there may be events that exist in between the brightness of these two types of events. “Current astronomical theories predict that sudden, fleeting events could occur that shine with a brightness between that of novae and supernovae,” Hubble scientists write. “Although shrouded in mystery and controversy, astronomers observed such an event in M99 and turned to Hubble for its keen vision to take a closer look and precisely locate the fading source.”

The other project for which M99 was observed was to look at how young stars form from clouds of cold dust, in a project called Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS with the Hubble Space Telescope (PHANGS-HST).

Georgina Torbet

Former Space Writer

Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…

Topics

Space

NASA’s new telescope can see 100 times more sky than Hubble in a single shot

NASA just launched a $4 billion telescope to map billions of galaxies

NASA Roman Telescope Launch Featured

The Hubble telescope has an almost legendary status. Over the last three decades, Hubble gave us some of the most spectacular close-ups of the universe ever captured, and now, NASA’s newest space telescope wants to see the bigger picture. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:26 a.m. EDT on August 30. Roman is now beginning a roughly three-month journey toward the Sun-Earth L2 point, nearly a million miles away, where it will spend its primary five-year mission surveying huge portions of the cosmos.

Roman carries a 2.4-meter primary mirror, the same diameter as Hubble’s, but its Wide Field Instrument can capture a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s. NASA expects it to use that combination of sharpness and scale to map billions of galaxies, study dark matter and dark energy, and discover enormous numbers of previously unknown worlds.

Space

NASA built the Roman Space Telescope to study dark matter, but it can also help protect Earth from killer asteroids

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope wasn't built to hunt asteroids, but it turns out to be great at it.

Nancy Grace Roman space telescope.

NASA is about to launch a telescope built to unlock some of the universe's biggest mysteries, and it turns out that same design could help protect Earth along the way.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch from Kennedy Space Center on August 30, 2026, with a primary mission focused on studying dark matter and dark energy - the invisible forces shaping galaxies and cosmic expansion. Researchers now say its unique design also makes it unexpectedly effective at spotting dangerous asteroids headed our way (via MIT Technology Review).

Space

Space is becoming Bezos and Musk’s next data center site, and we have every reason to worry

The AI boom is coming for the night sky

How Vast's space station will look in orbit.

AI data centers already consume vast amounts of electricity and water on Earth, so Silicon Valley has begun looking somewhere considerably more spacious... literally.

Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, along with several other companies, have proposed enormous constellations of satellites designed to operate as orbital data centers. However, environmental groups and former space officials are now warning that putting them into orbit at the proposed scale could have severe consequences for Earth's atmosphere and the night sky.