Hubble snaps an unusual galaxy around 25 million light-years from Earth

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features an unusual galaxy - NGC 1156 - that lacks a clear spiral or rounded shape, unlike many of the galaxies familiar to the premium telescope.

The shining red blossoms within the galaxy are stellar nurseries - regions where new stars are springing to life. Energetic light emitted by newborn stars in these regions of intense star formation streams outwards and encounters nearby pockets of hydrogen gas, causing it to glow with a characteristic pink hue

Located around 25 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Aries, this galactic marvel has a variety of different features that are of interest to astronomers. It is classified as isolated, meaning no other galaxies are nearby enough to influence its odd shape and continuing star formation. The extreme energy of freshly formed young stars gives colour to the galaxy, against the red glow of ionised hydrogen gas, while its centre is densely-packed with older generations of stars.

1/ This Picture of the Week features an unusual galaxy, NGC 1156. Its thousands of bright stars resemble a spiral but it also has typical properties of an elliptical galaxy: a diffuse glow and older, redder stars.Read more about this galactic marvel at 🔗 https://t.co/3ivxl63Ids pic.twitter.com/8pIkftJ1S4

— HUBBLE (@HUBBLE_space) August 22, 2022

While Hubble has captured this unusual galaxy before, this new image features data from a galactic gap-filling programme simply titled “Every Known Nearby Galaxy”.

Sharing this Hubble image, the European Space Agency (ESA) wrote in a post, "Astronomers noticed that only three-quarters of the galaxies within just over 30 million light-years of Earth had been observed by Hubble in sufficient detail to study the makeup of the stars within them. They proposed that in between larger projects, Hubble could take snapshots of the remaining quarter - including NGC 1156. "