NASA Hubble Space Telescope Captures a Stunning Spiral Galaxy 45 Million Light Years Away

An incredible new image of the spiral galaxy IC 1954 has been delivered by the NASA Hubble Space Telescope, about 45 million light years from Earth in the constellation Horologium, which translates as The Clock. Observing IC 1954 at its diagonal tilt, it appears like a cosmic pendulum with a bright core and sweeping spiral arms. This galaxy is crowded with star-forming regions. Pink regions in the picture give a glimpse of key properties of star formation in galaxies.

Combining observations from three state-of-the-art telescopes

New observations of IC 1954 yield significantly sharper images than those taken earlier. The addition of H-alpha data, corresponding to the red parts of the image, brings attention to regions rich in hydrogen and where stars are actively forming. These bright regions, spread across the galaxy’s disc, are regions where stars burst into life, says the European Space Agency (ESA), which issued a statement describing them. According to some astronomers, the bright ‘bar’ across the galaxy could be an energetic star-forming zone located above the galactic centre.

The detail in this image was, indeed, due to the combined efforts of three powerful telescopes. Apart from the Hubble Space Telescope, the observation also involved the James Webb Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile.

Together, these instruments are monitoring over fifty near neighbor galaxies, offering a panoramic view across radio, infrared, optical, and ultraviolet wavelengths. This is so crucial to know how matter moves through the interstellar dust and gases in galaxies to help better understand how galaxies evolve.

To that, the ESA added that Hubble’s ultraviolet and optical capabilities allowed for the earliest observations of young stars and clusters, and the wavelengths captured exactly when the newly born stars were most active. The data from Hubble will advance research on how stars evolve, based on work initiated by the James Webb Space Telescope’s science missions that started several years ago.