Just in time for Santa's arrival, NASA has shared an image of a galaxy that looks just like what it describes as a "sparkling snow globe."
The galaxy, named UGC 8091, is situated around 7 million light-years from Earth, and lies in the same direction as the constellation Virgo in our night sky.
The image of the spectacular galaxy comes from data gathered by NASA and ESA's Hubble Space Telescope over several years.
Rather than a neat spiral like Andromeda or the Milky Way, or a smooth elliptical shape like some of our other neighboring galaxies, UGC 8091 has a more scattershot shape, making it what is known as an "irregular" galaxy. Irregular galaxies don't have any kind of spiral arm structure, or a bulge in the center, and make up about a quarter of all the galaxies we have observed. Other irregular galaxies include the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of our closest galactic neighbors at 199,000 light-years away.
These galaxies are usually small, often only around one-tenth of the size of the Milky Way. They are shaped in their weird and wacky ways due to the tumultuous events of their formation, which can include interactions with other galaxies, or collisions with huge clouds of gas and dust.
UGC 8091 is also considered a dwarf galaxy, due to its smaller size. Hubble has been investigating dwarf galaxies around the cosmos to elucidate the role that they played billions of years ago after the Big Bang, as they are theorized to have been involved in re-heating hydrogen that had cooled off as the universe expanded.
The snow globe-like image of UGC 8091 comes from data gathered by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys from 2006 to 2021, combining 12 camera filters of different kinds of light ranging from the red end of the light spectrum all the way into ultraviolet light. The patches of red in the image are due to hot, excited hydrogen gas in newly formed stars, while the other lights are older stars.
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured several other iconic images over its years of service, including the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which zooms in on a tiny scrap of sky to reveal over 10,000 galaxies hidden in the dark, some of which are situated around 10 billion light-years away. This image was captured in 2003 originally, but an improved composite was released in 2014.
Another is the famous Pillars of Creation image, which shows three huge columns of space dust and gas that are part of the Eagle Nebula, around 7,000 light years away.
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Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Jess Thomson is a Newsweek Science Reporter based in London UK. Her focus is reporting on science, technology and healthcare. ... Read more
