This beautiful NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures a galaxy called NGC 5264.
This image, taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, shows the dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 5264. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble.
Discovered on March 30, 1835 by the English astronomer Sir John Frederick William Herschel, NGC 5264 is a dwarf galaxy situated approximately 14.5 million light-years from Earth.
Also known as DDO 242, ESO 445-12 and LEDA 48467, the galaxy lies in the constellation of Hydra.
Dwarf galaxies like NGC 5264 typically possess around a billion stars – just one per cent of the number of stars found within our own Milky Way Galaxy.
They are usually found orbiting other, larger, galaxies such as the Milky Way, and are thought to form from the material left over from the messy formation of their larger cosmic relatives.
NGC 5264 clearly possesses an irregular shape with knots of blue star formation.
Astronomers believe that this is due to the gravitational interactions between NGC 5264 and other galaxies nearby.
These past interactions sparked the formation of new generations of stars, which now glow in bright shades of blue.
This image of NGC 5264 (hi-res version) is composed of infrared and optical observations from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.
The broad V-band filter F606W and the infrared filter F814W were used to sample various wavelengths.
The color results from assigning different colors to each grayscale image associated with an individual filter.
