The news from the stars keeps coming and this time it’s about an impressive image that NASA has captured of a newly studied spiral galaxy.

The galaxy in question is called IC 1954 and is approximately 45 million light years away in the southern constellation of Horologium, one of the constellations that are at the limit of what is possible to admire with the naked eye because it is located 400 thousand light years from Earth.

This spiral galaxy has been in the sights of many astronomers for centuries since was discovered in 1898 by the Scottish astronomer Robert Innes, but it would not be until now that there is a clear picture of its appearance and, even better, data on what its formation and structure is like, as shared by the THAT.

To achieve this impressive achievement, the work of NASA’s space telescope was necessary, Hubble, to get the detailed image of the astral body. Once the representation was obtained, it was combined with radio data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, scientists were able to reconstruct a clearer picture of star formation.

The collaborative work worked so that the space telescope observed clusters of young stars in nearby galaxies at ultraviolet and optical wavelengths while the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) collected data on star-forming disks and cold gas clouds. That is, they could see the birth of stars in the galaxy as the process took place.

It was by means of a new wide-field camera that Hubble was able to absorb both visible light and ultraviolet light from the galaxy during different and long exposures to give us this final product, which in turn was able to join the information gathered in the ALMA to understand what was happening in that galaxy.

Regarding this achievement, astronomers from the Hubble telescope stated that “The combination of the two sets of observations allowed scientists to connect the dots and understand the connections between young stars and the clouds of cold gas that give rise to them”.

Thanks to joint work and detailed information, it is now known about IC 1954 that has an active and bright core from which gaseous expanses, full of dust and stars, propagate in a form quite similar to our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

As the galaxy spins, all that gas and dust continually collides and freezes into the stars, and the leftover material forms planets, moons, asteroid belts, and all the other things you can find in space.

This achievement also has more direct repercussions on the scientific and astronomical scene, as it marks the closest step to James Webb Space Telescope Launch, a collaborative effort between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency to launch this fall, which is claimed to be the largest and most technologically advanced space telescope of history.

As for IC 1954, recent discoveries, due to all their similarities to our own galaxy, also establish a benchmark for learning how the stars, moons, and planets that are part of our own space formed in the world. universe.

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