Galaxy M99 has a prominent spiral arm.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, WASHINGTON — The Hubble Space Telescope displays a stunning portrait of the galaxy. Newly released images of Hubble shows the mesmerizing spiral of a galaxy called M99.
The photo on display is of the galaxy’s well-defined stellar arms branching off from the galaxy’s dusty yellow center. The new images, released by the European Space Agency (ESA) on May 2, are the result of two recent Hubble-led studies.
Reported from Space, Wednesday (11/5/2022), a separate observation allowed Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to capture a sharper view of the spiral galaxy’s protruding arm and dotted with stars. The image shows a stark contrast between the glowing purple-blue hue of the expanding dense region of the star and the dark space around it.
M99, like the Milky Way, is a “grand design galaxy”, meaning it has prominent spiral arms. This category includes about 10 percent of all spiral galaxies, according to NASA. The shimmering M99 strand lies 42 million light-years from Earth.
The Hubble image is the result of two separate studies of the galaxy. The first research focused on stellar explosions called novae. This explosion, which occurs from a white dwarf pulling matter from a larger star, is much lighter than a supernova, which marks the death of a massive star.
However, astronomers also believe that there was an intermediate type of explosion, brighter than a nova but fainter than a supernova. And previous observations of M99 made in 2010, the Palomar Transient Facility found an object in a spiral galaxy with this type of brightness in between, according to the ESA. By returning their focus to M99, the scientists aim to uncover more information about this detection.
The second observation comes from Hubble’s involvement in a major study to explore the relationship between young stars and the gas clouds in which they appear. Galaxy M99 is one of 38 galaxies analyzed with the aim of improving scientists’ understanding of star formation.
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