Categories: AstronomygalaxiesImages

Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 2608, Surrounded by Many Many Other Galaxies

Looking deep into the Universe, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope catches a passing glimpse of the numerous arm-like structures that sweep around this barred spiral galaxy, known as NGC 2608. Appearing as a slightly stretched, smaller version of our Milky Way, the peppered blue and red spiral arms are anchored together by the prominent horizontal central bar of the galaxy. In Hubble photos, bright Milky Way stars will sometimes appear as pinpoints of light with prominent lens flares. A star with these features is seen in the lower right corner of the image, and another can be spotted just above the pale centre of the galaxy. The majority of the fainter points around NGC 2608, however, lack these features, and upon closer inspection they are revealed to be thousands of distant galaxies. NGC 2608 is just one among an uncountable number of kindred structures. Similar expanses of galaxies can be observed in other Hubble images such as the Hubble Deep Field which recorded over 3000 galaxies in one field of view.

Meet NGC 2608, a barred spiral galaxy about 93 million light years away, in the constellation Cancer. Also called Arp 12, it’s about 62,000 light years across, smaller than the Milky Way by a fair margin. The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image with its Wide-Field Camera 3 (WFC3).

Depending on your age, you may easily remember a time when images like this weren’t available. But the Hubble changed all that. The Hubble has reached deep into the Universe to capture images like this. And it’s now been doing it for 30 years—an entire human generation.

NGC 2608 may be the star of this image, <ahem> but there’s more going on. The two prominent points of light with spikes are foreground stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. They’re called diffraction spikes, and telescope optics make them appear like that.

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What’s interesting is all the other sources of light. Each one is a distant galaxy, and there are an almost impossible-to-count number of them in this image. You can see their disks, some edge-on, some face-on, and all angles in between. You can see the red-shifted light from some of them, while others appear white, green, or blue.

It’s a remarkable tableau. How many total stars are there in this image? How many planets? (Civilizations?) We’ll never know the answers to all those questions.

But we have learned a few things about barred spiral galaxies like NGC 2608.

The Hubble is no stranger to barred spiral galaxies and has imaged many of them. This is NGC 1300, a spiral, barred galaxy viewed nearly face-on by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble

They’re the most common type of galaxy as far as we can tell, and between half and two-thirds of all galaxies are barred spirals. The bar itself is a density wave rather than a collection of stars. Studies have shown that the bar density wave can compress gas and trigger star formation. Other research shows that the bar is a conduit for gas, channeling it inwards.

Other research conflicts with that, saying that the bar can distribute gas in a way that actually inhibits star formation. Clearly, we have a lot to learn.

But whatever the particulars are when it comes to barred spirals, they’re sure pretty.

Evan Gough