Category: galaxies

If you were approaching the edge of a spiral galaxy, arriving from afar through the cosmos, it might look something like this.

What is it?

In this new snapshot by the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), we can see the edge of the spiral galaxy NGC 1827. Found about 37 million light-years from Earth, this galaxy sparkles in this side-on view.

Not all spiral galaxies are the same. This galaxy is what is known as an "intermediate" spiral, which means that its structure sits somewhere between that of a barred and unbarred spiral galaxy. Barred galaxies have a distinctive central, bar-shaped structure, while the unbarred variety lacks this bar and can look more like circular spirals.

NGC 1827's spiral shape isn't clear from the side, however. From this perspective, we see its twinkling edge, speckled with stars and woven together with brown ribbons of dust.

Why is it incredible?

Beneath the beauty of this spiral edge lies an expansive, cosmic landscape. Bright blue stars dot the spiral's side, with one particularly luminous star taking the spotlight with four diffraction spikes — created by light bending through the inner workings of Hubble's camera — emanating from its center.

This image was captured as part of a larger Hubble survey that's exploring 260 satellite galaxies, which are galaxies gravitationally bound to larger hosts. Hubble is specifically looking to survey satellite galaxies that lie near host galaxies similar to our own Milky Way.

So far, Hubble has spotted 111 such satellites and will continue to observe, hunting for the rest.

By studying satellite galaxies like this one, which also happens to be an especially low-mass galaxy, researchers could better understand the complicated dynamics both within the galaxies themselves and between them and their host galaxies.

Astronomers have discovered the most distant Fast Radio Burst (FRB) ever detected. Not only could this help untangle the mystery of what causes these powerful but brief explosions of radio waves, but because FRBs are incredible celestial messengers, it could also reveal details of 11 billion years of cosmic evolution.

This FRB, designated FRB 20240304B, was first observed by astronomers using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. Then, using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers tracked it back to its home galaxy, located around 11 billion light-years away. This revealed that FRB 20240304B has been travelling to Earth since the universe was just 3 billion years old or so.

That doesn't just make this FRB 20240304B the most distant and earliest FRB ever detected; it more than doubles the distance of the previous record holder!

"This is an extraordinary glimpse into the distant universe," team co-leader Manisha Caleb from the Sydney Institute for Astronomy said in a statement sent to Space.com. "We have caught a fast radio burst from a time when the universe was only about three billion years old, and we have used that brief flash of radio light to learn about the matter it has travelled through over billions of years."

The team's research was published on Thursday (Oct. 8) in the journal Science.

A record breaking cosmic messenger

Fast Radio Bursts are mysterious blasts of radio waves that usually flare just once, and in the mere milliseconds they last, emit many times more energy than the sun can radiate in a year.

As these powerful millisecond-long blasts of radio waves travel billions of light-years to reach Earth, they pass through gas and dust in galaxies and through the "cosmic fog" lying between these galaxies, the so-called intergalactic medium. By measuring how much the signal slows down, scientists can effectively weigh this fog of gas to map the distribution of matter in galaxies.

That makes them crucial tools for understanding how galaxies use gas and dust to form stars and grow. Thus, FRBs are a metaphorical cosmic 'fossil record' blasting through space at light speed with the energy of a multitude of stars.

With that in mind, it is little wonder that as a record-breaking example of a fast radio burst, FRB 20240304B has already shocked astronomers. It did this by delivering a surprise about its home galaxy.

"The galaxy hosting this burst is surprisingly small, metal-poor and undergoing a very active episode of star formation," team member Laura Driessen, of the University of Sydney, said. "That gives us an important clue about the environments in which FRBs are born and shows that these brief radio flashes can tell us not only about the distant universe, but also about how galaxies and their stellar populations evolve."

One of the leading suspects in the creation of FRBs are magnetars, a type of neutron star created when a massive star collapses and dies in a supernova explosion. Unlike "standard" neutron stars, magnetars have fearsomely strong magnetic fields  — the strongest magnetic fields in the known universe, in fact.

There are different theories about how magnetars are born: one involving existing older neutron stars colliding and merging, the other involving environments with burgeoning star formation.

The galaxy from which FRB 20240304B originates seems to support that latter formation route, as it is young in the midst of "starburst," a period of extreme star formation.

Scientists will work on the mystery of the FRB/magnetar connection. In the meantime, this newly detected and tracked blast of radio waves definitely has expanded the boundaries of the cosmos that can be probed with FRBs.

"In principle, sufficiently powerful bursts could be detectable from the very early universe," team member Kavya Shaji said.

That means that FRBs are emerging as a promising way to study the first stars and galaxies in the universe. This is even more exciting considering that this research validates teaming the JWST with radio telescopes to detect and track FRBs back to their points of origin.

"Our results further show the amazing capability of the JWST, where we can push boundaries beyond what was previously possible," team member Themiya Nanayakkara of the University of Sydney said.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a brand new type of an otherwise familiar object – compact binary systems that steal gas from other stars, but which do so while emitting very low-energy X-rays but copious amounts of ultraviolet.

Chandra spotted 84 suspicious object emitting very low-energy X-rays in six galaxies – four evolved ellipticals and two spirals, namely our near-neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101).

"We've never encountered a group of objects that act like this," said Mustafa Muhibullah of the University of Alabama in a statement.

Compact objects, in the form of black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs, are the remains of stars that have died. Their small size and powerful gravity means that they're adept at getting close to orbiting companion stars and ripping the stars' outer layers of gas away. The gas swirls around the compact object, falling onto its surface, and this accretionary process usually produces torrents of high-energy X-rays because the stolen gas becomes superheated by the compact object's gravitational vice-like grip.

Because of their weak X-rays, Muhibullah's team refer to them as 'hypersoft X-ray sources'. Since low-energy X-rays and ultraviolet light are next to each other on the electromagnetic spectrum, Muhibullah and his team suspect that the low-energy X-rays are spillover from objects emitting prodigious amounts of ultraviolet. Moreover, they think that these objects are lower-level compact binaries.

They're hard to find though, because the interstellar medium of hydrogen and helium gas between the stars absorbs ultraviolet light. This could be why we have yet to find any hypersoft X-ray sources in our own galaxy, because we have to look through the interstellar medium through the plane of the Milky Way.

Consequently, there could be a large population of hypersoft X-ray sources that remain undiscovered and they could have an important effect on the universe around them.

"These clandestine X-ray sources are actually among the most energetic objects in galaxies, and they could be solving two cosmic mysteries at once," said Muhibullah.

The interstellar medium is filled with ionized gas where atoms have been shorn of electrons. Hot, massive stars do output a lot of high-energy ultraviolet light, but there are not enough of these stars to account for all the ionization. If hypersoft X-ray sources are dumping torrents of ultraviolet into space, they could explain the ionization instead. For stars to form, gas has to be cold and not ionized, so hypersoft X-ray sources could be gently regulating star formation within galaxies.

The second mystery is the puzzle over how exactly type Ia supernova explosions detonate. We know that they are fueled by white dwarfs accreting matter from a close companion star and, once the accumulated matter raises the white dwarf's mass beyond 1.44 times the mass of our sun – known as the Chandrasekhar limit – it explodes, but the details of what on the white dwarf actually ignites and how are fuzzy.

Studying a new breed of compact binary might finally reveal the answers and offer more clues about when white dwarfs become ready to explode.

"If we could find a way to spot these type Ia supernova explosions before they go off, that would be really important," said Jimmy Irwin of the University of Alabama, who is a member of Muhibullah's team. "Right now, we study them after they've exploded and astronomers have struggled to understand what is actually ignited."

Since type Ia supernova explosions are used as markers on the cosmic distance ladder, used for measuring the strength of dark energy and the expansion of the Universe, the benefits from understanding them better are clear to see in our efforts to understand how the Universe is evolving.

The findings were published on Sept. 9 in Nature Astronomy.

It is nearly impossible to fathom the entirety of a single galaxy — these realms can span hundreds of thousands of light-years, and sometimes are even millions of light-years across. So imagine the grandeur of now one but two galaxies tangled together, in the process of merging into one. That's what you're seeing in today's featured image.

What is it?

The merging galaxies shown above were discovered by a group of students using the Gemini North Telescope, located on the Maunakea volcano in Hawaii — a very popular and often controversial location for ground-based telescopes. The students hailed from two local institutions, Waiākea High School and the Volcano School of Arts and Sciences, and had access to the telescope with the Project Hōkūlani internship.

They named their discovery Nā 'Uhane Māhoe Huki Pū i ke Ola, which translates to "The Twin Spirits Pulling Together Creating Life."

"'Uhane (spirit) was an important theme for our group. Our experiences throughout the week — 'oli (stargazing), visiting the summit and learning about the awesome scientific discoveries made possible by Maunakea — ignited our own spirits as we prepare for life after high school," Samantha Silva-Sampaio, one of the students, said in a statement.

The students also explain how the rest of the name fits in with their time at Gemini North. "Huki Pū," they say, has to do with the physical aspect of the two galaxies being pulled together, just like communities coming together to enable the discovery as a whole. And "i ke Ola" is meant to show that life can be created from interacting galaxies because this process gives rise to star birth, and hopefully we'll find a star besides the sun one day that hosts life on a world around it.

Why is it incredible?

The galaxy merger depicted in the image is formally known as NGC 7253 and is located around 200 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. This region is also known as the Hawaiian constellation Ka Lupe o Kawelo.

What's especially spectacular about the image we see above is how sharply defined both galaxies appear during their gravitational interaction. It is also a treat to be able to live in a time when we can view an event happening so utterly far away with this much detail.

Galaxy mergers aren't a new thing, though. They occur all across the universe, and indeed even the Milky Way and our neighboring galaxy Andromeda are expected to collide (or maybe not?) at some point in the future. But not to fear — though it may not seem it from this image, within every galaxy is, well, a lot of space. So much so that it'd be surprising for anything in the colliding galaxies to actually smash together.

What does happen, however, is enchanting. All the interstellar gas and dust from both galaxies join together and lead to a spike in star formation. This means a ton of beautiful sparkles should decorate the final product of NGC 7253.

"'Uhane in this image reminds us that astronomy is not just science or spirit; it's both at the same time," Manu Silva-Sampaio, another one of the student discoverers, said in the statement.

Astronomers have used the MeerKAT radio telescope to detect hydrogen gas billions of light-years away from us — from a period when the cosmos was billions of years younger than its current age of 13.8 billion years.

The research may provide astronomers with a new way of mapping the large-scale structure of the universe. The technique would rely on charting out where hydrogen, the universe's lightest and most abundant element, is located across the cosmos. It's known as hydrogen intensity mapping.

Neutral hydrogen emits a faint radio signal that astronomers call the 21-centimeter line. As the cosmos expands under the influence of dark energy, the wavelength of this radio signal is stretched, or "redshifted." The extremity of the redshift allows astronomers to determine how long a particular signal has been travelling to us and thus what period of the universe the hydrogen that emitted it existed in.

Using the 21-centimeter line, hydrogen intensity mapping allows astronomers to trace radio emissions from hitherto unseen galaxies and build a 3D picture of the largest structures in the universe. Up until this point, however, this technique has relied on combining radio wave detection with observations from galactic surveys operating with visible light, or electromagnetic radiation our eyes have evolved to see.

This new research defies that trend, building a hydrogen intensity map using radio waves detected by the MeerKAT radio telescope, made up of 64 antennas in the Meerkat National Park in the Northern Cape of South Africa.

"This is a very exciting milestone," team leader Sourabh Paul said in a statement. "Hydrogen intensity mapping has long been seen as a promising way to map the universe efficiently, but the signal is extremely faint and difficult to isolate from foreground emission, human-made radio-frequency interference, and instrumental effects.

"Detecting it directly with MeerKAT shows that this technique is becoming a practical tool for cosmology."

Mapping with MeerKAT

The team behind this research analyzed around 96 hours of MeerKAT observations, finding signals from hydrogen dating back 4 billion to 5 billion years. This hydrogen spans distances of many million light-years, similar to the distance between the Milky Way and our neighbor galaxy, Andromeda.

The achievement represents a step forward in the usefulness of hydrogen mapping.

"Neutral hydrogen is one of the key ingredients for understanding how galaxies form and evolve," team member Zhaoting Chen of the University of Edinburgh said in the statement. "With intensity mapping, we do not need to detect every individual galaxy. Instead, we can measure the collective signal from hydrogen across large cosmic volumes, giving us a new way to study both galaxy evolution and the underlying matter distribution of the universe."

Future cosmological surveys could greatly benefit from the advancement of hydrogen mapping. This will be a major factor when the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), currently under construction in the Murchison region of Western Australia and the Karoo region of South Africa.

"MeerKAT continues to open new windows for cosmology," team member Laura Wolz of the University of Manchester in the U.K. said in the statement. "The fact that this signal can be extracted from observations that were not originally designed for hydrogen intensity mapping is very encouraging. It shows the enormous scientific value of MeerKAT data and points the way to future observations with SKAO."

The team will now focus on collecting further observations with MeerKAT that cover larger areas of the sky over longer periods of time. This should provide astronomers with even more detailed hydrogen maps that could, in time, help understand how the largest structures in the cosmos took shape over the course of billions of years.

"This was a challenging data analysis process, requiring a detailed understanding of the many sources of contamination that can affect such a faint measurement," team member Mario G. Santos of the University of the Western Cape, Australia, said in the statement. "It is particularly remarkable that the data used in this study were taken in 2018, when MeerKAT had only just started science operations.

"There is now a rich trove of MeerKAT data waiting to be explored with this method."

The team's research was published in the July edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Scientists are closer than ever before to confirming that a galaxy known as "Cloud 9" is the first "starless" or "failed" galaxy ever discovered by humanity.

A starless galaxy is one with virtually no stars despite possessing a wealth of gas and dust that would normally serve as the building blocks of stars. The dominant element of a starless galaxy would be dark matter, the mysterious "stuff" that remains effectively invisible because it doesn't interact with light.

Located 14 million light-years away near the spiral galaxy Messier 94 (M94), Cloud 9 is currently the best candidate for a starless galaxy humanity has discovered to date. It contains a vast cloud of hydrogen gas with an estimated mass of 1 million times that of the sun, and dark matter with around 5 million solar masses. Yet, the Hubble Space Telescope discovered in January this year that Cloud 9 emits virtually no starlight.

"But the most striking aspect of our research was the absolute emptiness of the image at the location of Cloud 9. When you look at an image reaching those depths and see nothing where a structure containing a million solar masses of gas should be, it is genuinely remarkable," team leader Ignacio Trujillo of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain, told Space.com.

"Most objects in the universe leave some trace of light. Cloud 9 does not. That silence is, in its own way, the most compelling result we could have obtained."

On the hunt for a failed galaxy

Trujillo explained that despite having enough raw material to build a small galaxy, Cloud 9 seems to have never formed any significant stellar population.

"That combination — gas but no stars, sitting in a relatively normal environment — makes it one of the most compelling candidates for what theorists call a 'dark' or starless galaxy," Trujillo added. "The concept has been theoretically predicted for decades, but observationally confirmed cases remain elusive.

"The difficulty is obvious: if there are no stars, there is no visible light to detect, and the only way to find such objects is through their gas emission — typically neutral hydrogen observed at radio wavelengths — combined with extremely deep optical imaging to rule out the presence of even a faint stellar component."

Trujillo and colleagues set about investigating Cloud 9 using the HiPERCAM camera on the Gran Telescopio Canarias, the world's largest optical telescope. This led to them obtaining the deepest images ever taken of the Cloud 9 region, approximately ten times deeper than any previous optical imaging of this object. "Honestly, the depth we achieved with HiPERCAM in just 2.36 hours of integration was striking," Trujillo said. What they saw left no questions about the nature of this galaxy.

"The result was clear: we detected absolutely no stellar emission within the region corresponding to the location of Cloud 9," Trujillo said. "Assuming an old, metal-poor stellar population — which would be the hardest kind to detect — we can set an upper limit on the total stellar mass of just 16,000 solar masses.

"Cloud-9 appears to be, within the limits of our observations, genuinely starless."

Why do some galaxies 'fail?'

Though starless galaxies are on the verge of escaping the realms of the purely theoretical thanks to this investigation of Cloud 9, how they form is still something of a puzzle.

However, scientists do have a pretty solid idea of how a galaxy could take shape without birthing stars.

"The leading theoretical explanation involves the ultraviolet background radiation that permeates the universe," Trujillo said. "After the epoch of reionization, this radiation field heats the gas in low-mass dark matter halos to temperatures high enough that the gas cannot cool efficiently and collapse to form stars."

The researcher added that simulations of this period of the cosmos predict that dark matter halos below a certain mass threshold, around 5 billion solar masses, should remain essentially starless.

"Cloud 9 has a halo mass consistent with this regime. In this picture, starless galaxies are not exotic anomalies but a natural and abundant prediction of standard cosmological models," Trujillo explained. "The challenge has simply been finding them."

As impressive as these results are, the jury is still out on Cloud 9 as a starless galaxy. Further investigation will be needed before scientists can firmly declare they have discovered the first starless galaxy.

"On the stellar side, deeper space-based imaging would be particularly valuable because resolving individual stars avoids many of the problems associated with diffuse-light measurements," Trujillo concluded.

"Hubble has already provided extremely strong evidence, and future facilities such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could potentially push the search further, although the optimal filters and stellar tracers would need to be carefully chosen."

The team's research is available on the paper repository site arXiv.

A trio of NASA space telescopes teamed up to capture a gorgeous new look at the glowing spiral galaxy NGC 4258 and its two anomalous extra arms.

What is it?

This image shows NGC 4258, also known as Messier 106, a spiral galaxy located some 24 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici, the "Hunting Dogs." It is a fairly bright galaxy and can be viewed in the spring sky in the Northern Hemisphere with most telescopes.

Messier 106 is noteworthy for having two "anomalous" extra arms, the long curved regions of bright gases, dust and young stars that are characteristic of all spiral galaxies. But while most spiral galaxies have only a pair of arms, Messier 106 has two pairs. According to NASA, the extra set is composed of hot gases that are churned away from the galactic center by the supermassive black hole at the heart of NGC 4258.

Why is it incredible?

This image shows off the incredible teamwork that NASA's flagship orbital observatories can pull off. It combines X-ray observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory (seen here in royal blue), optical light gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope (red, yellow and pale blue), and infrared light seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (bright orange).

By combining multiple types of light into one image, NASA is able to reveal the complete picture of what this energetic galaxy is made of.

The image also shows the incredible power of the black holes found at the centers of galaxies. "M106 helps show how supermassive black holes can create structural features that mimic star-bearing spiral arms, influencing a galaxy's evolution," NASA wrote in a statement accompanying the image.

This image was part of a NASA release of 16 new "galactic gems" captured by Chandra and other observatories.

The Milky Way has something of a torrid and violent history, given that our galaxy has fueled its own growth by cannibalistically devouring smaller galaxies. Now, astronomers have discovered evidence of our galaxy's earliest bout of cannibalism in the form of "scarring" at the heart of the Milky Way left behind by a galactic morsel it devoured around 12 billion years ago.

Working as part of the ARMA (Cluster Ages to Reconstruct the Milky Way Assembly) project, the team behind this discovery used dense conglomerations of ancient stars called globular clusters to find traces of a merger that occurred around 1.8 billion years earlier than the previously earliest known event of this type.

Prior to this, the history of the Milky Way colliding and merging with both smaller and larger galaxies had only been reconstructed up to around 10 billion years ago, around 3.8 billion years after the Big Bang. The earliest bout of cosmic cannibalism involved the collision with and consumption of the dwarf galaxy Gaia-Enceladus about 10 billion years ago. That means the earliest history of the Milky Way was, until now, shrouded in mystery.

"This work tells us what happened to the Milky Way in its infancy," team member Chiara Zerbinati of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Bologna, Italy, said in a statement. "It sheds light on a particularly significant event that influenced the entire subsequent evolution of the galaxy. If one of humanity's great questions is 'where do we come from?', we offer at least a piece of the answer."

A helping hand from Hubble

The key development in the quest to delve further back into the history of the Milky Way was delivered by the Hubble Space Telescope.

"We started with the ambition of reconstructing the assembly history of the Milky Way, that is, all the galactic merger events that led to its current appearance," team leader Davide Massari of the Italian Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) said. "We used globular clusters as tracers: especially in the inner regions of the galaxy, where extinction is highest, they are the only objects for which we can obtain excellent measurements of both orbital motion and age."

Astronomers developed a technique using Hubble data that allowed them to discover the ages of globular clusters with a far greater precision than had ever been possible before. This revealed that the globular clusters at the heart of our galaxy can be categorized in three distinct ways based upon their age and their metallicity, a measure of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which astronomers refer to as metals.

One group of globular clusters could be linked directly to the Gaia-Enceladus merger; one belonged to the original Milky Way; but there also existed a third group distinct enough from the other two groups that it must have come from some hitherto undiscovered merger event.

The team was able to deduce some things about this doomed galaxy from this third group of globular clusters. They found the unfortunate galaxy had around the same mass as Gaia-Enceladus, about 500 million times the mass of the sun. For comparison, the Milky Way today has a mass of around 1.5 trillion solar masses.

The researchers also found that most of the matter from this devoured dwarf galaxy was dumped into the Milky Way within 20,000 light-years of our galaxy's heart. They also gave a name to this violent, yet formative cosmic event.

"The final name, Low-energy-Kraken-Heracles (LKH), is an acronym that pays homage to the three papers that first hypothesized the existence of this ancient galactic encounter," Massari concluded.

The team's research was published on Monday, August 17, in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Imagine looking at a vast city on Earth from a great distance, knowing nothing about that city; you may assume that its only buildings are the largest, most visible skyscrapers. But, get closer or look with a far more powerful tool, and you would begin to discover smaller buildings between mountainous skyscrapers.

Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has discovered that this looks like that is a fitting analogy for early galaxies.

Astronomers are finding that in between the brightest stars, the 'tallest skyscrapers' in the above analogy, there are much fainter stars analogous to smaller buildings. That means early galaxies may actually have a lot more mass packed into them than we believed.

The team behind this research reached this conclusion by using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study nine early galaxies that have passed through their period of intense star formation. They combined this data with observations from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) here on Earth to measure the population of small and faint stars in these galaxies for the first time. What they found was that the proportion of small stars in these galaxies is much greater than is found in modern galaxies like the Milky Way. This comes as something of a surprise to scientists who have assumed these populations would be similar.

"This means that the galaxy as a whole is much more massive than previous estimates suggested," team member Chloe Cheng of Leiden University, Netherlands, said in a statement.

The first 'cosmic cities' weren't dominated by skyscrapers, it just looks that way

Astronomers study galaxies and calculate their stellar population rates using the total light, or spectrum, coming from these cosmic metropolises. The problem is, the more massive a star is, the brighter it is. Thus, the overall spectrum of a galaxy is dominated by the most massive stars, while smaller stars are drowned out.

The sensitivity of the JWST has allowed astronomers to finally give these smaller stars a chance to shine and stand out, like spotting an incredible piece of architecture in a vast metropolis of glass and steel.

"Until recently, this type of measurement was simply not possible," team member Martje Slob of Leiden University said. "We needed not only a telescope that collects sufficient light, but also spectra of exceptional quality and new analysis techniques to reliably distinguish the subtle features of small stars."

The team's discovery has implications for our understanding of young galaxies in the early universe. This is because scientists had always assumed the stars of different masses were born in the same proportion across cosmic history. Now that seemingly isn't the case.

That is especially true if more early galaxies are like one particularly striking example examined in this study. This galaxy, which formed less than 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, contains up to four times the mass previously estimated thanks to its huge population of smaller stars.

Thus, our models of galaxy formation may need some serious revision in the near future.

"This result shows that much more mass than previously thought is hidden in small stars," team leader Mariska Kriek of Leiden University said. "That has implications for all kinds of fields within astronomy. Because many planets orbit small stars, it could even mean that more planets formed in the early universe than we previously assumed."

The team now intends to apply this method to more of the universe's earliest galaxies, hoping to stretch their investigation back to the universe's first stars.

The team's research was published on Wednesday (August 18) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Sometimes, incredibly powerful space telescopes work together to accomplish amazing things. Recently, observations made by both the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble were combined in a composite image that shows the incredible nature of the "Black Eye Galaxy," more formally known as Messier 64.

What is it?

The Black Eye Galaxy is a strange spiral galaxy located 17 million light-years from Earth, in the constellation Coma Berenices, a name that means "Berenice's Hair" in Latin.

Discovered in 1779, the Black Eye Galaxy is fairly isolated from other galaxies and is known for its hypnotizing "stare." This look is created by the galaxy's internal, swirling motion. However, unlike many other spiral galaxies, the gas in the outer reaches of this one rotates in the opposite direction to the gas and stars closer to its center, creating an especially unusual motion.

To capture this incredible composite view of the galaxy, astronomers combined near and mid-infrared wavelength observations made by JWST and ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared observations made by Hubble.

Why is it incredible?

As we look forward to observations from NASA's upcoming flagship space observer, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, this collaborative effort shows how such powerful instruments don't replace one another; rather, they bring different capabilities to the table and can complement each other.

And, while this new image is the result of a team effort of cutting edge-technology, the Black Eye Galaxy is also a favorite target for backyard astronomers because it can often be spotted in small telescopes.