Astronomers have published a new, extremely spectacular image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, which recently celebrated its 35th birthday. It shows the “skewed” galaxy NGC 1961.
Galaxy NGC 1961, also known as Arp 184, is located about 190 million light-years away from Earth toward the constellation Camelopardalis. It is part of the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, which was compiled by astronomer Halton Arp in 1966. It includes galaxies that cannot be assigned to a particular class because they have distinct individual features. Many are in the process of interacting with other galaxies and are neither fully spiral nor elliptical. Others are dwarf galaxies with no clearly defined structure.
NGC 1961 takes its place in the Atlas because of its wide, star-studded spiral arm, which seems to reach out to us in the Hubble image. The galaxy has a few spots of gas and stars at the far end, but it does not have such an impressive spiral arm.
At this point, astronomers do not know how this distortion occurred. NGC 1961 has no companion or double nucleus, which could indicate a recent merger. It’s also worth noting that the galaxy shows quite a bit of activity. Over the past 30 years, it has become home to four supernovae.
The image of NGC 1961 was taken by Hubble during its Snapshot program. In its framework, the space telescope makes observations in the short intervals that occur between observations of other celestial objects.
Earlier we reported on how the rotation of the Universe can explain the Hubble paradox.
According to Esahubble
