By ESA/Hubble
April 3, 2022
Hubble Space Telescope picture of NGC 5921, a galaxy that lies approximately 80 million light-years from Earth. Credit: ESA/Hubble & & NASA, J. Walsh, Acknowledgement: R. Colombari
The slackly winding spiral arms of the galaxy NGC 5921 snake across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy lies around 80 million light-years from Earth, and much like our own galaxy, the Milky Way, includes a popular bar. Roughly half of all spiral galaxies are thought to contain bars, and these bars impact their parent galaxies by sustaining star formation and impacting the motion of stars and interstellar gas..
Properly, provided NGC 5921s serpentine spiral arms, this galaxy lives in the constellation Serpens in the northern celestial hemisphere. Serpens is the only one of the 88 contemporary constellations to include 2 inapplicable regions– Serpens Caput and Serpens Cauda. These two regions– whose names mean the Serpents Head and the Serpents Tail, respectively– are separated by Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer..
The scientific study behind this image was likewise split into 2 parts– observations from Hubbles Wide Field Camera 3 and observations from the ground-based Gemini Observatory. These 2 observatories signed up with forces to much better comprehend the relationship in between galaxies like NGC 5921 and the supermassive great voids they consist of. Hubbles contribution to the research study was to determine the masses of stars in the galaxies and likewise to take measurements that assist adjust the observations from Gemini. Together, the Hubble and Gemini observations supplied astronomers with a census of neighboring supermassive great voids in a diverse range of galaxies.