Monday, September 28, 2026

Diving into an Out-of-sync Galaxy

The spiral galaxy NGC 4698 is a member of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. Its serene vision hides the fact that it has a tail of hydrogen gas stretching away from it; the spin of its arms is decoupled from the spin of the stars and gas in the center, and its bulge stretches out in an odd shape. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker, the MAUVE-HST Team

Galaxies are like snowflakes, no two exactly alike, even the spirals. The Hubble Space Telescope did a visual dive into the distant spiral NGC 4693 and found some intriguing hints to its past. For one thing, this member of the Virgo Cluster seems to have a central region that's rotating out of sync with the spiral arms and bulge. Those arms don't seem to connect to the central region, and the bulge itself seems to extend out above the plane of the galaxy.



No comments:

Post a Comment