New NASA Hubble image captures a rare, turbulent galaxy

New NASA Hubble image captures rare, turbulent galaxy

By Adam Kovac edited by Claire Cameron

The universe is full of galaxies, but in our neighborhood of the universe, some are rarer than others. Most local galaxies are young, vibrant objects that are full of freshly born stars or quieter elliptical galaxies that have minimal star formation. Only 1 percent fall somewhere in between, and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope now appears to have sighted one of these transitional galaxies.

Located 100 million light years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus, the galaxy, called NGC 1266, is what is known as a lenticular galaxy. In a statement, NASA explained that these galaxies are considered by astronomers to be an “evolutionary bridge” between spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way and elliptical galaxies, known to have a shape similar to an elongated circle. NGC 1266 is shaped like a flattened, lens-shaped disk and a bright central bulge of a spiral galaxy. But it has no spiral arms and, like an elliptical galaxy, appears to have little or no star formation taking place.

In the new Hubble image, the galaxy is partially obscured by clumps of rust-colored dust and gas. While NGC 1266 may not be generating new stars, that wasn’t the case in the not-so-distant past (relative to the age of the universe, at least). The stars in the galaxy appear relatively young, meaning that NGC 1266 is a post-stellar explosion galaxy. Nearly one in 100 galaxies in the area near the Milky Way fall into this middle-age category.

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Astronomers think that about 500 million years ago, NGC 1266 merged with a smaller galaxy, leading to an explosion of star formation, but the collision also increased the mass in the central bulge. Although the extra gas could have led to the formation of more new stars, it appears that this gas was instead sucked into the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole. As the black hole became more active, it generated powerful bursts of gas along its rotation axis, which would have further disrupted the star formation process. Previous observations by Hubble and other observatories have detected gas leaks from NGC 1266, further supporting this theory of why so few new stars are being born there.

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