Hubble images our ghostly neighborhood galaxy NGC 6684

By Georgina Torbet August 14, 2023

Scientists working with the Hubble Space Telescope release an image each week that the telescope has taken recently, and this week’s image shows a lenticular galaxy located 44 million light-years away. Known as NGC 6684, this galaxy in the constellation of Pavo, which can be seen from the Southern Hemisphere.

Lenticular galaxies are different from spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way. Instead of distinct spiral arms reaching out from a center, lenticular galaxies are more amorphous and diffuse, but with a central disk. This type of galaxy is halfway between a spiral galaxy and an elliptical galaxy, which is smooth and almost featureless. Lenticular galaxies don’t have much interstellar matter, or dust and gas floating between stars, so there isn’t much material for the creation of new stars and the rate of star formation within these galaxies is low. The lack of structure in this type of galaxy is emphasized by its absence of dust lanes, making it look even more “ghostly,” as Hubble scientists dub it.

The lenticular galaxy NGC 6684 bathes this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in a pale light. Captured with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, this galaxy is around 44 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pavo. Pavo – the Latin name for peacock – is a constellation in the southern sky and one of four constellations collectively known as the Southern Birds. — The lenticular galaxy NGC 6684 bathes this image from the NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope in a pale light. Captured with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, this galaxy is around 44 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pavo. Pavo – the Latin name for peacock – is a constellation in the southern sky and one of four constellations collectively known as the Southern Birds. ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Tully

This image was taken as part of a Hubble program called Every Known Nearby Galaxy, which aims to use Hubble to observe every galaxy we know about located within 10 megaparsecs (32.6 million light-years) of Earth that has not yet been imaged. “Before this program began, Hubble had observed roughly 75% of these nearby galaxies,” Hubble scientists write. “Completing this census will reveal insights into the stars making up a wide variety of galaxies, in a wide variety of environments.”

Other galaxies observed as part of this program include LEDA 48062, a faint and sparse galaxy that was imaged in a striking setting among a variety of other galaxy types and the small and fuzzy dwarf galaxy UGCA 307. And Hubble has imaged other close-by galaxies for different programs of research as well, such as a stunningly detailed image of our neighbor, the Triangulum galaxy, that shows the full spiral face of the galaxy as it stretches across nearly 20,000 light-years.

Topics

Tech News

Georgina Torbet

Space Writer

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

Space

Celebrate Hubble’s 34th birthday with this gorgeous nebula image

In celebration of the 34th anniversary of the launch of NASA’s legendary Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers took a snapshot of the Little Dumbbell Nebula, also known as Messier 76, or M76, located 3,400 light-years away in the northern circumpolar constellation Perseus. The name 'Little Dumbbell' comes from its shape that is a two-lobed structure of colorful, mottled, glowing gases resembling a balloon that’s been pinched around a middle waist. Like an inflating balloon, the lobes are expanding into space from a dying star seen as a white dot in the center. Blistering ultraviolet radiation from the super-hot star is causing the gases to glow. The red color is from nitrogen, and blue is from oxygen.

Tomorrow, April 24, marks the 34th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. For more than three decades, this venerable old telescope has been peering out into space, observing stars, galaxies, and nebulae to understand more about the universe we live in. To celebrate this birthday, Hubble scientists have shared a new image showing the striking Little Dumbbell Nebula, also known as Messier 76, which is located 3,400 light-years away.

In celebration of the 34th anniversary of the launch of NASA’s legendary Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers took a snapshot of the Little Dumbbell Nebula, also known as Messier 76, or M76, located 3,400 light-years away in the northern circumpolar constellation Perseus. NASA, ESA, STScI

Space

Biggest stellar black hole to date discovered in our galaxy

Astronomers have found the most massive stellar black hole in our galaxy, thanks to the wobbling motion it induces on a companion star. This artist’s impression shows the orbits of both the star and the black hole, dubbed Gaia BH3, around their common centre of mass. This wobbling was measured over several years with the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission. Additional data from other telescopes, including ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, confirmed that the mass of this black hole is 33 times that of our Sun. The chemical composition of the companion star suggests that the black hole was formed after the collapse of a massive star with very few heavy elements, or metals, as predicted by theory.

Black holes generally come in two sizes: big and really big. As they are so dense, they are measured in terms of mass rather than size, and astronomers call these two groups of stellar mass black holes (as in, equivalent to the mass of the sun) and supermassive black holes. Why there are hardly any intermediate-mass black holes is an ongoing question in astronomy research, and the most massive stellar mass black holes known in our galaxy tend to be up to 20 times the mass of the sun. Recently, though, astronomers have discovered a much larger stellar mass black hole that weighs 33 times the mass of the sun.

Not only is this new discovery the most massive stellar black hole discovered in our galaxy to date but it is also surprisingly close to us. Located just 2,000 light-years away, it is one of the closest known black holes to Earth.

Space

Hubble discovers over 1,000 new asteroids thanks to photobombing

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the barred spiral galaxy UGC 12158 looks like someone took a white marking pen to it. In reality it is a combination of time exposures of a foreground asteroid moving through Hubble’s field of view, photobombing the observation of the galaxy. Several exposures of the galaxy were taken, which is evidenced by the dashed pattern.

The Hubble Space Telescope is most famous for taking images of far-off galaxies, but it is also useful for studying objects right here in our own solar system. Recently, researchers have gotten creative and found a way to use Hubble data to detect previously unknown asteroids that are mostly located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The researchers discovered an incredible 1,031 new asteroids, many of them small and difficult to detect with several hundred of them less than a kilometer in size. To identify the asteroids, the researchers combed through a total of 37,000 Hubble images taken over a 19-year time period, identifying the tell-tale trail of asteroids zipping past Hubble's camera.