This image, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on board the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the star-forming galaxy NGC 3125.
This Hubble image shows the nearby starburst galaxy NGC 3125. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Judy Schmidt, www.geckzilla.com.
NGC 3125 lies about 45 million light-years away in the constellation of Antlia.
It was discovered on March 30, 1835, by English astronomer, mathematician and chemist John Herschel.
Also known as ESO 435-41 and LEDA 29366, NGC 3125 is an example of a starburst galaxy, a galaxy in which unusually high numbers of new stars are forming, springing to life within clouds of hot gas.
The galaxy is similar to, but unfathomably brighter and more energetic than, one of the Magellanic Clouds.
Spanning approximately 15,000 light-years, NGC 3125 displays massive bursts of star formation, as shown by the hot, young, and blue stars scattered throughout the galaxy’s core.
Some of these clumps of stars are notable – one of the most extreme Wolf-Rayet star clusters in the local Universe, NGC 3125-A1, resides within the galaxy.
Despite their appearance, the fuzzy white blobs dotted around the edge of this galaxy are not stars, but globular star clusters.
Found within a galaxy’s halo, these clusters are ancient collections of hundreds of thousands of stars.
They orbit around galactic centers like satellites – our Milky Way Galaxy, for example, hosts over 150 of them.
The color image of NGC 3125 was made from separate exposures taken in the visible, near-infrared (IR) and near-ultraviolet (UV) regions of the spectrum with Hubble’s ACS camera.
Five filters — the near-UV filter F330W, the near-IR filter F814W, the blue filter F435W, the green filter F555W, and the red filter F658N — were used to sample various wavelengths.
The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter.
