Galaxy NGC4314: a bright ring of starbirth around a galaxy's core | 10/06/1998 | ||
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An
image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals clusters of infant stars
that formed in a ring around the core of the barred-spiral galaxy NGC 4314.
This stellar nursery, whose inhabitants were created within the past 5 million
years, is the only place in the entire galaxy where new stars are being
born.
Click image to go to high resolution image. |
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Image Credit: G. Fritz Benedict, Andrew Howell, Inger Jorgensen, David Chapell (University of Texas), Jeffery Kenney (Yale University), and Beverly J. Smith (CASA, University of Colorado), and NASA (STScI). | |||
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An
image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals clusters of infant stars
that formed in a ring around the core of the barred-spiral galaxy NGC 4314.
This stellar nursery, whose inhabitants were created within the past 5 million
years, is the only place in the entire galaxy where new stars are being
born. This close-up view by Hubble also shows other interesting details in the galaxy's core: dust lanes, a smaller bar of stars, dust and gas embedded in the stellar ring, and an extra pair of spiral arms packed with young stars. These details make the center resemble a miniature version of a spiral galaxy. While it is not unusual to have dust lanes and rings of gas in the centers of galaxies, it is uncommon to have spiral arms full of young stars in the cores. NGC 4314 is one of the nearest (only 40 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices) examples of a galaxy with a ring of infant stars close to the core. This stellar ring - whose radius is 1,000 light-years - is a great laboratory to study star formation in galaxies. The left-hand image, taken in February 1996 by the 30-inch telescope Prime Focus Camera at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, shows the entire galaxy, including the bar of stars bisecting the core and the outer spiral arms, which begin near the ends of this bar. The box around the galaxy's core pinpoints the focus of the Hubble image. |
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The
right-hand image shows Hubble's close-up view of the galaxy's core, taken
in December 1995 by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. The bluish-purple
clumps that form the ring are the clusters of infant stars. Two dark, wispy
lanes of dust and a pair of blue spiral arms are just outside the star-forming
ring. The lanes of dust are being shepherded into the ring by the longer,
primary stellar bar seen in the ground-based (left-hand) image. The gas
is trapped inside the ring through the stars' gravitational attraction.
The two spiral arms outside the ring are probably unrelated to the dust
lanes, and seem to contain very little dust or gas. The stars in these spiral
arms are bluer than most of the galaxy, indicating that many of them are
relatively young, less than 200 million years old. However, they are older
than those in the ring. This information suggests that the neighborhood
of star formation is moving closer to the galaxy's core. Another interpretation
has the arms formed through the gravitational interaction of the embedded
bar and ring of stars, causing them to spray outward. |
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