A stunning new image from NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows two of the Milky Way’s nearby neighboring galaxies: LEDA 48062 and UGC 8603, located in the constellation Canis Hounds.
LEDA 48062 is a dim, sparse, amorphous galaxy visible on the right side of this new Hubble image. It is accompanied by a more defined neighbor on the left, the large disk-shaped lenticular galaxy UGC 8603.
LEDA 48062 is only 30 million light-years from the Milky Way; UGC 8603 lies 132 million light-years from our home galaxy. Both objects were observed as part of the Every Known Nearby Galaxy campaign.
“The goal of this campaign was just that: to observe every known galaxy within 10 megaparsecs (about 33 million light years) of the Milky Way,” the astronomers explained.
By getting to know our galactic neighbors, we can determine what types of stars are in different galaxies, as well as outline the local structure of the universe.
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A small number of more distant galaxies in the background and a few stars in the foreground are also visible in this space telescope image.
Have you ever wondered why the stars, in these kinds of images, are surrounded by four sharp peaks? These peaks are called diffraction bursts and are formed when starlight refracts or propagates around support structures inside reflecting telescopes such as Hubble.
The four spikes are formed by the four thin blades that support Hubble’s secondary mirror and are only visible to bright objects such as stars, where a lot of light is concentrated in one place.
Darker and more dispersed objects, such as neighboring galaxies in the Milky Way, do not have visible diffraction bursts.
