PHOTO OF THE DAY: NASA’s Hubble Telescope Checks On Galactic Neighbor 11 Million Light-Years Away
By NASA information center // July 3, 2023
highly irregular galaxy is known as ESO 174-1
(NASA) – The highly irregular galaxy ESO 174-1, which resembles a lonely, hazy cloud against a backdrop of bright stars, dominates this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
ESO 174-1 lies around 11 million light-years from Earth and consists of a bright cloud of stars and a faint, meandering tendril of dark gas and dust.
This image is part of a collection of Hubble observations designed to better understand our nearby galactic neighbors. The observations aim to resolve the brightest stars and basic properties of every known galaxy within 10 megaparsecs.
A parsec is a unit used by astronomers to measure the vast distances to other galaxies – 10 megaparsecs translates to 32 million light-years – and makes astronomical distances easier to handle. For example, the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is about 1.3 parsecs away. In everyday units, this is a staggering 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km)!
The program to capture all of our neighboring galaxies was designed to use the 2-3% of Hubble time available between observations.
It’s inefficient for Hubble to make back-to-back observations of objects that are in opposite parts of the sky. Observing programs like the one that captured ESO 174-1 fills the gaps between other observations.
This way the telescope can move gradually from one observation to another, while still collecting data. These fill-in observing programs make the most out of every last minute of Hubble’s observing time.
Related Story:NASA Appoints Dr. Jane Rigby as the New James Webb Space Telescope Senior Project Scientist
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