Hubble Space Telescope picture of spiral nebula ESO 415-19,, which lies around 450 million light-years away. Credit: ESA/Hubble & & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/ DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/ NSF/AURA.
The peculiar spiral galaxy ESO 415-19, which is situated approximately 450 million light-years far from Earth, extends slackly across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. While the center of this object looks like a routine spiral galaxy, long streams of stars extend from the galactic core like bizarrely extended spiral arms. These are tidal streams brought on by some chance interaction in the galaxys past, and provide ESO 415-19 a clearly peculiar look.
ESO 415-19s peculiarity made it a great target for Hubble. This observation comes from an ongoing project to explore the Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, a menagerie of a few of the weirdest and most wonderful galaxies that the Universe has to provide. These galaxies vary from bizarre lonely galaxies to stunningly interacting galaxy pairs, triplets, and even quintets. These space quirks are spread throughout the night sky, which indicates that Hubble can spare a moment to observe them as it moves between other observational targets.
The snapshot consists of galaxies of different ages, shapes, sizes, and colors. The tiniest, reddest galaxies may be among the most remote known, existing when the universe was simply about 800 million years old. The nearby galaxies– the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals– flourished about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old.
This constellation was also the site of a particularly important Hubble observation; the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (see image above). Creating the Ultra Deep Field needed nearly a million seconds of Hubble time, and captured nearly 10,000 galaxies of various ages, shapes, sizes, and colors.
The strange spiral galaxy ESO 415-19, which is situated around 450 million light-years away from Earth, extends slackly throughout this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. These galaxies vary from bizarre lonely galaxies to spectacularly communicating galaxy pairs, triplets, and even quintets. Developing the Ultra Deep Field required almost a million seconds of Hubble time, and recorded nearly 10,000 galaxies of various ages, shapes, colors, and sizes.