Skip to main content

Hubble images the spooky Spider Galaxy

This week’s image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows an irregular galaxy, the spindly arms and clawed shape of which has led to it being named the Spider Galaxy. Located 30 million light-years away, the galaxy also known as UGC 5829 is an irregular galaxy that lacks the clear, orderly arms seen in spiral galaxies like the Milky Way.

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the irregular galaxy UGC 5829.
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the irregular galaxy UGC 5829. ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Tully, M. Messa

As it is diffuse and faint, this galaxy has not often been studied. It does have a similarly named partner galaxy, the Spiderweb Galaxy, or MRC 1138-262, which has been more extensively studied — including by Hubble. The Spiderweb Galaxy is located 300 times further from Earth than the Spider Galaxy, but has been a target for research looking into how smaller galaxies merge to create one larger galaxy.

Recommended Videos

As for the Spider Galaxy, this image is made up of data from two different research programs. “The data in this image come from two Hubble observing programs. The first used Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to look at relatively nearby galaxies in an effort to build color versus brightness diagrams of the stars in these galaxies. Each observation only took one Hubble orbit (about 95 minutes) but provided a valuable archival record of the types of stars in different galaxies and therefore different environments,” Hubble scientists explain in a statement.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

“The second program used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to look at star clusters in dwarf galaxies. Their observations leveraged Hubble’s ultraviolet capabilities, along with its ability to see fine details, to better understand the environment where stars form in dwarf galaxies. The star-forming regions of UGC 5829 are readily visible in this image as bright-pink nebulae or clouds.”

While Hubble’s instruments operate primarily in the visible light range, which is the same range of wavelengths that can be seen by the human eye, they do also have the ability to look in some ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths. Using these different wavelengths allows scientists to observe features that would otherwise be hard to detect, as seen in this ultraviolet image of Jupiter taken by Hubble that shows off the planet’s great red spot.

You can get an idea of what the same object looks like at different wavelengths by comparing objects viewed by Hubble‘s visible light instruments with those viewed by the James Webb Space Telescope’s infrared instruments.

Georgina Torbet
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
Gorgeous James Webb Space Telescope images land on new U.S. stamps
A new USPS stamp featuring an image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope.

In a mark of its huge impact on the world of science and astronomy, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope finds itself once again as the inspiration for a new set of stamps from the United States Postal Service (USPS).

Two new stamps issued this month feature iconic images captured by Webb, one of them showing a spiral galaxy called NGC 628. “Webb’s observations combine near- and mid-infrared light to reveal glowing gas and dust in stark shades of orange and red, as well as finer spiral shapes with the appearance of jagged edges,” NASA said of the image (below), adding that the galaxy is located 32 million light-years away in the Pisces constellation.

Read more
Hubble snaps another gorgeous image of the Tarantula Nebula
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a dusty yet sparkling scene from one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Large Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy situated about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa.

This gorgeous new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a bustling nearby star forming region called the Tarantula Nebula. Given its name due to its complex, web-like internal structure, this nebula is located in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way called the Large Magellanic Cloud and is often studied by astronomers researching star formation and evolution.

This new image shows the edges of the nebula, further out from its center. In the middle of the nebula are enormous stars that are as much as 200 times the mass of the sun, but here on the outskirts the view is calmer.

Read more
See the amazing images of Mercury captured by the BepiColombo mission
This is one of a series of images taken by the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission on 8 January 2025 as the spacecraft sped by for its sixth and final gravity assist manoeuvre at the planet. Flying over Mercury's north pole gave the spacecraft's monitoring camera 1 (M-CAM 1) a unique opportunity to peer down into the shadowy polar craters. M-CAM 1 took this long-exposure photograph of Mercury's north pole at 07:07 CET, when the spacecraft was about 787 km from the planet’s surface. The spacecraft’s closest approach of 295 km took place on the planet's night side at 06:59 CET.

The European Space Agency (ESA)'s BepiColombo mission has made another flyby of Mercury, capturing fascinating images of this lesser-studied inner planet. On January 8, 2025, the spacecraft made its sixth flyby of the small planet located close to the sun, taking advantage of the planet's gravity to adjust its course so it can enter orbit in 2026.

On the flyby, the spacecraft passed within just 180 miles of Mercury's surface, enabling it to capture close-up images of the planet. It passed the planet's night side, which faces out into space and away from the sun, then over its north pole before swinging over to see its north hemisphere in the sunlight. The images were captured with the spacecraft's three monitoring cameras, called M-CAM 1, 2, and 3, which take black-and-white images with a resolution of 1024 x 1024. Despite this relatively low resolution, the images are still scientifically valuable as they show many of the planet's surface features.

Read more