The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a striking new photo of a dwarf galaxy called UGC 11411.
This image shows the irregular blue compact dwarf galaxy UGC 11411 (center). The bright stars are foreground stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. Image credit: ESA / Hubble / NASA.
UGC 11411, also known as LEDA 62814, is an irregular blue compact dwarf (BCD) galaxy located in the constellation Draco, approximately 21.5 million light-years away.
BCDs are a group of gas rich extragalactic objects that are characterized by their blue optical colors.
These galaxies have luminosities, small sizes – they are usually smaller than 3,300 light-years, and are thought to be the least chemically evolved galaxies in the local Universe.
They are made up of large clusters of hot, massive stars that ionize the surrounding gas with their intense radiation.
With these massive stars being less than 10 million years old, BCD galaxies are very young objects, which have experienced recent bursts of star formation in an unevolved chemical environment.
As such these galaxies have been proposed as nearby analogs of star formation in young galaxies in the early Universe.
Because of this astronomers consider these galaxies to be good objects to study to improve our understanding of primordial star-forming processes.
