In this new image, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has focused its lens on the central part of the spiral galaxy NGC 3430.
This Hubble image shows NGC 3430, a spiral galaxy some 100 million light-years in the constellation of Leo Minor. The color image was made from separate exposures taken in the visible and near-infrared regions of the spectrum with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). It is based on data obtained through two filters. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / C. Kilpatrick.
NGC 3430 is located around 100 million light-years in the constellation of Leo Minor.
Otherwise known as IC 2613, LEDA 32614 or UGC 5982, this galaxy has a diameter of about 85,000 light-years.
NGC 3430 was first spotted on December 7, 1785 by the German-born British astronomer William Herschel.
“Several other galaxies are located relatively nearby to this one, just out of frame,” the Hubble astronomers said.
“One is close enough that gravitational interaction is driving some star formation in NGC 3430.”
“That NGC 3430 is such a fine example of a galactic spiral may be why it ended up as part of the sample that Edwin Hubble used to define his classification of galaxies.”
“Namesake of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, in 1926, he authored a paper which classified some four hundred galaxies by their appearance — as either spiral, barred spiral, lenticular, elliptical or irregular.”
“This straightforward typology proved immensely influential, and the modern, more detailed schemes that astronomers use today are still based on it.”
“NGC 3430 itself is an SAc galaxy — a spiral galaxy lacking a central bar with open, clearly-defined arms,” they added.
“At the time of Hubble’s paper, the study of galaxies in their own right was in its infancy.”
“With the benefit of Henrietta Leavitt’s work on Cepheid variable stars, Hubble had only a couple of years before settled the debate about whether these ‘nebulae,’ as they were called then, were situated within our galaxy or were distant and independent.”
“He himself referred to ‘extragalactic nebulae’ in his paper, indicating that they lay beyond the Milky Way Galaxy.”
“Once it became clear that these distant objects were very different from actual nebulae, the favored term for a while was the quite poetic ‘island universe’.”
“While NGC 3430 may look as if it still deserves this moniker, today we simply call it and the objects like it a ‘galaxy’.”