This galaxy looks nothing like a galaxy you’ve ever seen before.
NASA has unveiled a new photo from the Hubble Space Telescope, which shows a galaxy so densely packed with stars you can barely tell it’s a galaxy at all.
The incredible photo is full of so many stars it doesn’t look like the spiral or Milky Way galaxies we’ve come to recognize.
The ‘irregular’ galaxy, known as ESO 245-5, has a lack of structure and is an IB(s)m type of galaxy under the De Vaucouleurs galaxy classification system. This means it has no ordered structure and has a dense bar of glistening stars across the center.
Although they believe it has a slight spiral structure, and may be similar to the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds that are irregular satellite galaxies of the Milky Way.
It was found 15 million light-years from Earth within the constellation Phoenix and is a ‘relatively’ close neighbor to our planet considering how large the universe is.
It comes after a new study about the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy – Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) is spinning so quickly it’s warping spacetime and is looking more like a football.
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the NSF’s Karl G Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) found the results. Researchers were studying how quickly the black hole was spinning by looking at how material was flowing towards and away from Sgr A*.
Black holes have two properties, how much they weigh and how quickly they rotate. Scientists can find out a lot about a black hole by determining either of these values and how it behaves.
Previous studies theorized Sgr A* was either not spinning at all or at the maximum rate. However, the new study suggests it’s spinning with an angular velocity of 60% with an angular momentum of 90%.
The faster it spins, the more it looks like a football.
Comments are closed.