NASA shares fascinating Hubble image featuring 'blossoms' of intense star-forming areas

Ending the week in style, NASA has shared a thrilling new image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope which shows regions of intense star formation in interstellar space. As the US space agency calls it, the image features shining red ‘blossoms’ where thick clouds of dust and gas are giving birth to stars around 25 million light-years away. This enthralling region is in the galaxy NGC 1156 and is located in the constellation Aries with several interesting features. 

Observations through the Hubble telescope have confirmed that it is a dwarf irregular galaxy and no nearby galaxies can influence its odd shape and continuous star formation since it is completely isolated. Interestingly, the red glow in the picture is resulting from the ionisation of hydrogen gas and the extreme energy being radiated from the newly formed stars is giving colours to the galaxy against the reddish hue. NASA said that since the galaxy's centre is densely packed with older generations of stars, it is radiating a diffused glow, much like an elliptical galaxy.

Although the galaxy has been labelled an isolated one, some pockets of its gas rotating in the opposite direction suggest that there has been a close encounter with another galaxy in NGC 1156's past. "The gravity of this other galaxy— and the turbulent chaos of such an interaction— could have scrambled the likely more orderly rotation of material within NGC 1156, producing the odd behaviour we see today," NASA said in a statement. 

Hubble observes another elliptical galaxy

The new image comes after NASA shared a picture of the elliptical galaxy Messier 60 (M60) located 54 million light-years away. Having a diameter of 1,20,000 light-years and as massive as one trillion suns, Messier 60 has a central black hole that has a mass of 4.5 billion suns. This galaxy is embedded in the galaxy cluster named Virgo and is its third brightest member. Accompanied by another bluish spiral galaxy, the two galaxies have been found to be experiencing some tidal interaction, as per NASA.