Nov. 19 () –
The Hubble space telescope has captured the spiral galaxy UGC 10043, located about 150 million light years from Earth in the Serpens constellation, and one of the few that can be seen from the side.
From this point of view, the galaxy’s disk is seen as a sharp line through space, overlaid with a prominent dust line. This dust spreads across the spiral arms of UGC 10043, but looks very thick and cloudy when viewed from the side. You can even see the lights of some active star-forming regions in the arms, shining from behind the dust.
Surprisingly, we can also see that the center of the galaxy sports a bright, almost egg-shaped “bulge” rising far above and below the disk. All spiral galaxies have a bulge like this as part of their structure, containing stars that orbit the galactic center on paths above and below the rotating disk; Is a feature that is not normally obvious in galaxy images. The unusually large size of this bulge compared to the galaxy’s disk is possibly due to UGC 10043 pulling material from a nearby dwarf galaxy. This may also be the reason why the disc is warped, bending up at one end and down at the other.
Like most full-color Hubble images, this image is a composite, made up of several individual snapshots taken by Hubble at different times and capturing different wavelengths of light. One notable aspect of this image is that the two Hubble data sets used were collected 23 years apart, in 2000 and 2023, NASA reports.
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