NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has produced this beautiful image of the lenticular galaxy NGC 5308.
This Hubble image shows the lenticular galaxy NGC 5308. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Judy Schmidt, www.geckzilla.com.
NGC 5308, also known as LEDA 48860 and UGC 8722, is an edge-on lenticular galaxy.
It lies in the constellation of Ursa Major, approximately 85.4 million light-years from Earth.
Members of a galaxy type that lies somewhere between an elliptical and a spiral galaxy, lenticular galaxies are disk galaxies without any conspicuous structure in their disks.
This is probably because they have either used up most of their interstellar matter, so that they consist of old stars only, which have found a smooth and even distribution in the disk by the time, or because the galaxy has not closely encountered any neighbor in the past few hundred million years.
Some lenticular galaxies, just like spirals, have a bar. They are called ‘barred lenticular galaxies’ and are denoted SB0.
Normal lenticular galaxies such as NGC 5308 are denoted S0.
The origins of S0 galaxies are still unknown, but one idea is that they were originally spiral galaxies.
According to astronomers, lenticular galaxies are often orbited by gravitationally bound collections of hundreds of thousands of older stars.
Called globular clusters, these dense collections of stars form a delicate halo as they orbit around the main body of NGC 5308, appearing as bright dots on the dark sky.
In October 1996 one of aging stars within NGC 5308 was seen to explode as a spectacular Type Ia supernova and named SN 1996bk.
The dim, irregular galaxy to the right of NGC 5308 is known as SDSS J134646.18+605911.9.
This picture was made from separate exposures taken in the visible and infrared regions of the spectrum with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).
