Hubble captures serpentine spiral arms of a spiral galaxy 80 million light-years away

This week's picture from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features a spiral galaxy that lies approximately 80 million light-years from Earth.

The above image by Hubble shows the serpentine spiral arms of NGC 5921. Located in the constellation Serpens in the northern celestial hemisphere, the galaxy, much like our own Milky Way galaxy, contains a prominent bar.

Sharing the image, the European Space Agency (ESA) wrote, "The scientific study behind this image was also split into two parts — observations from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and observations from the ground-based Gemini Observatory. These two observatories joined forces to better understand the relationship between galaxies like NGC 5921 and the supermassive black holes they contain."

"Hubble's contribution to the study was to determine the masses of stars in the galaxies and also to take measurements that help calibrate the observations from Gemini. Together, the Hubble and Gemini observations provided astronomers with a census of nearby supermassive black holes in a diverse variety of galaxies," it added.

The lazily winding spiral arms of the galaxy NGC 5921 snake across this Picture of the Week from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. 🔗 https://t.co/UDlwmlJDYfCredit: @esa / @HUBBLE_space / @NASA , J. WalshAcknowledgement: R. Colombari pic.twitter.com/IZ06O3W8Zl

— HUBBLE (@HUBBLE_space) April 4, 2022

Hubble, a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA, was launched and deployed by the space shuttle Discovery in 1990. The space-based telescope has made more than 1.5 million scientific observations in its 31+ years of operation.