The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a remarkable new picture of NGC 5398.
This image, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on board the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the barred spiral galaxy NGC 5398. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble.
NGC 5398 (also known as LEDA 49923, ESO 384-32 and UGCA 379) is a magnitude 12.6 barred spiral galaxy.
It resides roughly 38 million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus and is famous for containing an especially extensive H II region, a large cloud composed of ionized hydrogen.
NGC 5398’s cloud is named Tol 89 and sits at the lower left end of the galaxy’s central ‘bar’ of stars, a structure that cuts through the galactic core and funnels material inwards to maintain the star formation occurring there.
Tol 86 is conspicuous in being the only large star-forming complex in the entire galaxy.It contains at least seven young and massive star clusters.
The two brightest clumps within Tol 89, which astronomers have named Tol 89-A and Tol 89-B, appear to have undergone two bursts of star-forming activity approximately 4 million and less than 3 million years ago respectively.
Tol 89-A is thought to contain a number of particularly bright and massive stars known as Wolf-Rayet stars, which are known for their high temperatures and extreme stellar winds.
The newly-released image of NGC 5398 is made up of observations from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) in the optical part of the spectrum. It is based on data obtained through five filters.
The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter.
