Star-birth party almost over in NGC 2976

Esahubble_opo1005a_1024

esahubble_opo1005a January 14th, 2010

Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Dalcanton and B. Williams (University of Washington, Seattle)

NGC 2976 does not look like a typical spiral galaxy, as this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows. In this view of the oddball galaxy's inner region, there are no obvious spiral arms. Dusty filaments running through the disc show no clear spiral structure. A raucous interaction with a neighbouring group of hefty galaxies stripped away some gas and funneled the rest to the galaxy's inner region, fueling star birth about 500 million years ago. At the same time, the galaxy's outer regions stopped making stars because the gas ran out. Now, the inner disc is almost out of gas as new stars burst to life, shrinking the star-formation region to a small area of about 5,000 light-years around the core. Astronomers pieced together the galaxy's star-formation story with the help of Hubble's sharp vision. The galaxy's relatively close distance to Earth allowed Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to resolve hundreds of thousands of individual stars. What look like grains of sand in the image are actually single stars. Studying the individual stars allowed astronomers to determine their colour and brightness, which provided information about when they formed. Based on this analysis, the astronomers reconstructed the star-making history for large areas of the galaxy. The blue dots in the image are fledgling blue giant stars residing in the remaining active star-birth regions. NGC 2976 resides on the fringe of the M81 group of galaxies, located about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. The observation is part of the ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury (ANGST) program. Data for the image were taken from 27 December 2006 to 10 January 2007.

Provider: Hubble Space Telescope | ESA

Image Source: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo1005a/

Curator: ESA/Hubble, Garching bei München, Germany

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Image Details

Image Type
Observation
Object Name
NGC 2976
Subject - Local Universe
Galaxy > Type > Spiral
Esahubble_opo1005a_128
 

Position Details

Position (ICRS)
RA = 9h 47m 20.3s
DEC = 67° 54’ 32.0”
Orientation
North is 127.1° CCW
Field of View
2.8 x 1.9 arcminutes
Constellation
Ursa Major

Color Mapping

  Telescope Spectral Band Wavelength
Red Hubble (ACS) Infrared (I) 814.0 nm
Green Hubble (ACS) Optical (V) 606.0 nm
Blue Hubble (ACS) Optical (B) 475.0 nm
Spectrum_base
Red
Green
Blue
Esahubble_opo1005a_1280
×
ID
opo1005a
Subject Category
C.5.1.1  
Subject Name
NGC 2976
Credits
NASA, ESA, and J. Dalcanton and B. Williams (University of Washington, Seattle)
Release Date
2010-01-14T15:00:00
Lightyears
Redshift
Reference Url
https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo1005a/
Type
Observation
Image Quality
Distance Notes
Facility
Hubble Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope
Instrument
ACS, ACS, ACS
Color Assignment
Red, Green, Blue
Band
Infrared, Optical, Optical
Bandpass
I, V, B
Central Wavelength
814, 606, 475
Start Time
Integration Time
Dataset ID
Notes
Coordinate Frame
ICRS
Equinox
J2000
Reference Value
146.8344422, 67.9088931
Reference Dimension
3337.0, 2331.0
Reference Pixel
1669.5, 1166.5
Scale
-1.39134e-05, 1.3913445e-05
Rotation
127.12
Coordinate System Projection:
TAN
Quality
Full
FITS Header
Notes
Creator (Curator)
ESA/Hubble
URL
http://www.spacetelescope.org/
Name
Email
Telephone
Address
Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 2
City
Garching bei München
State/Province
Postal Code
D-85748
Country
Germany
Rights
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Publisher
ESA/Hubble
Publisher ID
esahubble
Resource ID
opo1005a
Metadata Date
2019-10-07T11:40:33.679057
Metadata Version
1.1
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Detailed color mapping information coming soon...

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There is no distance meta data in this image.

 

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