![]() The hole is about 250 light-years wide and its presence is still something of a mystery. One of its most distinctive features, however, is the dark, starry gap called a “superbubble,” visible in this Hubble Space Telescope image in the upper central region. N44 is a complex nebula filled with glowing hydrogen gas, dark lanes of dust, massive stars, and many populations of stars of different ages. Their observations could help explain how clusters like NGC 6544 change over time. Instead of matching up sources to a pulsar, however, astronomers used Hubble to search for the counterparts of faint X-ray sources. The second observation which contributed data to this image was also designed to find the visible counterparts of objects detected at other electromagnetic wavelengths. This pulsar rotates particularly quickly, and astronomers turned to Hubble to help determine how this object evolved in NGC 6544. A pulsar is the rapidly spinning remnant of a dead star, emitting twin beams of electromagnetic radiation like a vast astronomical lighthouse. The first observation was designed to find a visible counterpart to the radio pulsar discovered in NGC 6544. This image of NGC 6544 combines data from two of Hubble’s instruments, the Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3, as well as two separate astronomical observations. This cluster of tightly bound stars lies more than 8,000 light-years from Earth and is, like all globular clusters, a densely populated region of tens of thousands of stars. Image credit: NASA, ESA & A.The teeming stars of the globular cluster NGC 6544 glisten in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The competition is now closed, and the list of winners, including André’s image of Messier 77, is available here. Hidden Treasures is an initiative to invite astronomy enthusiasts to search the Hubble archive for stunning images that have never been seen by the general public. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA. The dust lanes stretching across this image appear as a rusty, brown-red colour due to a phenomenon known as reddening the dust absorbs more blue light than red light, enhancing its apparent redness.Ī version of this image won second place in the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures Image Processing Competition, entered by contestant Andre van der Hoeven. These baby stars shine strongly, ionising nearby gas which then glows a deep red colour as seen in the image above. Dotted along each arm are knotty red clumps - a signal that new stars are forming. This region of a galaxy alone, although comparatively small, can be tens of thousands of times brighter than a typical galaxy.Īlthough no competition for the intense centre, Messier 77’s spiral arms are also very bright regions. Material is dragged towards this black hole and circles around it, heating up and glowing strongly. ![]() Strong radiation like this is known to come from the heart of Messier 77 - caused by a very active black hole that is around 15 million times the mass of our Sun. It is the closest and brightest example of a particular class of galaxies known as Seyfert galaxies - galaxies that are full of hot, highly ionised gas that glows brightly, emitting intense radiation. Now, however, it is firmly categorised as a barred spiral galaxy, with loosely wound arms and a relatively small central bulge. It was misclassified again when it was subsequently listed in the Messier Catalogue as a star cluster. It is a real star among galaxies, with more papers written about it than many other galaxies put together!ĭespite its current fame and striking swirling appearance, the galaxy has been a victim of mistaken identity a couple of times when it was initially discovered in 1780, the distinction between gas clouds and galaxies was not known, causing finder Pierre Méchain to miss its true nature and label it as a nebula. Also known as NGC 1068, it is one of the most famous and well-studied galaxies. Messier 77 is a galaxy in the constellation of Cetus, some 45 million light-years away from us. The patches of red across this image highlight pockets of star formation along the pinwheeling arms, with dark dust lanes stretching across the galaxy’s energetic centre. ![]() The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured this vivid image of spiral galaxy Messier 77, one of the most famous and well-studied galaxies in the sky. ![]()
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