NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captures the forward-facing spiral galaxy, IC 5332. ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Chandra, J
This shimmering image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the spiral galaxy IC 5332. The galaxy is located about 30 million light years away in the constellation Sculptor and is oriented almost facing Earth. To understand the term ‘face to face’, it is useful to visualize spiral galaxies as very large disks.
If the galaxy’s orientation makes it appear circular and disk-shaped from our perspective on Earth, then we call it ‘face-to-face’. On the other hand, if the galaxy’s orientation is such that it appears squashed and oval-shaped, then we call it ‘edge-on’. The key is that the same galaxy will look very different from our perspective, depending on whether it is facing forward or edge-on when viewed from Earth.
IC 5332 is a SABc type galaxy in the De Vaucouleurs galaxy classification system. The letter ‘S’ identifies it as a spiral galaxy, and indeed it is, given its obvious arms composed of bright stars and dark dust curling out from the galaxy’s dense, bright core. The ‘AB’ designation is a little more complicated. This means that the galaxy has a weak latitude, which refers to the shape of the galaxy’s center.
The majority of spiral galaxies do not emerge from a single point, but rather from an elongated bar-type structure. SAB galaxies – also known as intermediate spiral galaxies – do not have a clear bar shape at their core, but also do not spiral out from one point, instead sitting somewhere in between. The lowercase ‘c’ describes how tightly wound the spiral arms are: ‘a’ indicates a very tight wound, and ‘d’ indicates a very loose wound. Thus, IC 5332 is an intermediate spiral galaxy in many respects: weakly barred, with fairly loosely coiled arms, and almost entirely forward-facing!
Text credit: European Space Agency
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2023-10-21 08:06:44
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