Image: ESA/Hubble & NASA, V. Antoniou; Acknowledgment: Judy Schmidt
NGC 2336 was discovered over a century ago, but the big, blue spiral galaxy has never looked better, thanks to an eye-catching image obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope.
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German astronomer Wilhelm Tempel discovered NGC 2336 in 1876, which he did with a humble 11-inch (0.28 meter) telescope. He could’ve scarcely imagined a photo like this, taken by Hubble’s 7.9-foot (2.4 meters) main mirror, according to a NASA press release.
NGC 2336 is approximately 100 million light-years away and located in the northern constellation of Camelopardalis (which depicts a giraffe). With its eight prominent spiral arms, NGC 2336 measures some 200,000 light-years across. By contrast, the Milky Way another spiral galaxy is around half that size, measuring 105,000 light-years in diameter.
Astronomers Found a Benjamin Button Galaxy
Photo: MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP via Getty Images (Getty Images)
At 1.2 billion years young, the galaxy ALESS 073.1 should have the chaotic look of a youthful galaxy a fledging, diffuse group of stars and gas suspended in the early universe. Instead, this primordial starburst galaxy has a central bulge and rotating belt that makes it look billions of years older. This odd corner of the universe was recently imaged by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile.
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An international team of astronomers dug into the nascent galaxy’s rapid development in a recent analysis published in the journal Scientific Reports. They found ALESS’s age to be less than 10% the current age of the universe, but parts of its structure indicate a much older entity. Specifically, the presence of a bulge in the galaxy’s center and a rotating disc surrounding that center, feature that astronomers have historically only seen in galaxies that have had