Cosmic snake: NASA Hubble spies magnificent serpentine spiral lying 80 Mn light years away

In its three decades of service, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has filled its gallery with many unprecedented and stare-worthy photographs of the cosmos. Be it a star-producing nebula or an entire galaxy, the telescope’s view of such entities has presented the universe in a new light. Similar is the case with Hubble’s latest photograph, wherein it spies a cosmic snake located about 80 million light-years away from Earth. 

Introducing the cosmic serpentine spiral

The photograph, taken using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and observations from the ground-based Gemini Observatory, features lazily winding spiral arms of the galaxy named NGC 5921. NASA says that much like our Milky Way galaxy, the galaxy NGC 5921 also contains a prominent bar, which is a central linear band of stars. The agency explains that these bars can be found in roughly half of all spiral galaxies. Astronomers have discovered that these bars affect their parent galaxies as they fuel star formation and also influence the interstellar gas and even the motion of stars.

As mentioned above, this spiral galaxy lies 80 million light-years away from Earth and can be found in the constellation called Serpens in the northern celestial hemisphere. "Serpens is the only one of the 88 modern constellations with two unconnected regions – Serpens Caput (Serpent’s Head) and Serpens Cauda (Serpent’s Tail)", NASA says. Notably, what separates the two regions has been named Ophiuchus or the Serpent Bearer.

As for the discoverers of this galaxy, NASA says that the telescopes helped scientists better understand the relationship between galaxies like NGC 5921 and the supermassive black residing at their galactic center. "Hubble’s contribution determined the masses of stars in the galaxies. Hubble also took measurements that helped calibrate the observations from Gemini. Together, Hubble and Gemini provided astronomers with a census of nearby supermassive black holes in a diverse variety of galaxies", NASA said in a statement. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that the Hubble space telescope is at the final stages of its life owing to many technical glitches it has suffered lately. However, the technical faults are not surprising as the Hubble was built by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) using technologies that are now decades old.