Astronomers working with the Hubble telescope have published a spectacular new space image. In its center, you can see an object that somewhat resembles a ghost. This is the galaxy NGC 6684.
NGC 6684 is located at a distance of about 44 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Pavo. It is classified as a lenticular galaxy. Such objects occupy an intermediate position between spiral and elliptical galaxies.
Like spiral galaxies, lenticular galaxies have a disk and a bulge. At the same time, they do not show a characteristic spiral structure. Another important difference lies in the composition of the stellar population. As a rule, lenticular galaxies have already used up most of their gas reserves. Therefore, the rate of star formation in them is lowered. Lenticular galaxies are mostly inhabited by old luminaries, which makes them related to elliptical galaxies. If you look at the image of NGC 6684, you can notice that it also lacks the bands of dark dust characteristic of spiral galaxies. All together, this gives it a characteristic ghostly appearance.
The NGC 6684 image was taken as part of the Every Known Nearby Galaxy project. Its purpose is to photograph all known objects located within a radius of 10 megaparsecs (32.6 million light-years) from the Earth. Before the start of the program, Hubble had already studied more than 75% of such galaxies, the current task is to cover the missing objects.
Earlier we talked about how the Hubble telescope took a detailed picture of a globular cluster.
According to https://esahubble.org
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