Spiral galaxy NGC 5248 is located 42 million light-years away from us in the constellation Boötes. Recently, the Hubble Space Telescope has pleased astronomy enthusiasts with its amazing photos.
Spiral galaxy NGC 5248
The glittering scene depicted in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is the spiral galaxy NGC 5248, located 42 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Boötes. It is also known as Caldwell 45. The Caldwell catalog contains visually interesting celestial objects which are not as often observed by amateur astronomers as the better known Messier objects.
NGC 5248 is one of the so-called “grand design” spirals, with prominent spiral arms stretching from the core to the disk. It also has a faint bar structure in the center between the inner ends of the spiral arms, which is not so obvious in this visible-light portrait from Hubble.
These features, which break the symmetry of galaxy rotation, have a huge impact on how matter moves within it, and finally on its evolution through time. They feed gas from the outer regions of the galaxy into the inner regions of star formation and even into the galaxy’s central black hole, where it can give rise to an active galactic nucleus.
“Nuclear rings” at the center of the galaxy
These gas flows greatly shaped NGC 5248; it has many bright “stellar regions” of intense star formation scattered across its disk, dominated by a population of young stars. The galaxy even has two very active ring-shaped stellar regions around its nucleus, filled with young clusters of stars.
These “nuclear rings” are quite remarkable, but usually the “nuclear ring” tends to block gas from entering the galactic core. NGC 5248, which has a second ring inside the first, is a marker of how powerful matter and energy flows can be.
Since the galaxy is relatively close, its highly visible starburst regions make it a target for professional and amateur astronomers.
According to phys.org
