Hubble captures image of spiral galaxy NGC 1827

NASA announced that the Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of the edge-on, intermediate spiral galaxy NGC 1827. The galaxy is located roughly 37 million light-years away in the constellation Columba, the Dove.

The image was taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. It reveals bright-blue regions along the galaxy's disk dotted with dark dust lanes where new stars are likely forming. A bright foreground star appears just to the left of the galaxy's bright central bulge but is located between us and the galaxy. The galaxy's four diffraction spikes are the result of light bending around the internal supports that hold Hubble's secondary mirror.

Hubble captured the image as part of a survey looking at 260 satellite galaxies around 22 Milky Way-like host galaxies within a radius of about 32 million light-years from Earth. Hubble has already observed 111 of these satellite galaxies. The remaining galaxies will take an additional 149 Hubble orbits, one orbit for each galaxy, to observe.

Low-mass galaxies like the ones in this Hubble observing program provide a way to test the predictions of cosmological models on small scales, which struggle to match observations. The data Hubble gathers will help researchers better understand and characterize the properties of low-mass galaxies in Milky Way-like systems, allowing them to refine cosmological models.

The contact for this announcement is Claire Andreoli at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed fundamental understanding of the universe.