NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope returns images of objects in the universe for storage in a data archive. The new image shows the delicate glow of a galaxy called IC 3430, 45 million light years from Earth, in the constellation Maiden.

Astronomers describe IC 3430 as a dwarf elliptical galaxy. and it is part of the Virgo group, a group of many large and small diseases IC 3430 with a simple elliptical shape. It has almost no recognizable features, such as spiral arms or a core, and lacks the gas needed to form many new stars, but IC 3430 has some attractive features: its large, blue, star-filled core and very hot This is something that is rarely seen in elliptical galaxies. This indicates recent star formation activity.

Astronomers believe that the pressure from galaxies pushing through the gas within the Maiden cluster interacts with the gas in the center of IC 3430, forming new stars.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Sun