All Wound Up

Credit: NASA and The Hub­ble Her­itage Team (STScI/AURA)

Arms of dark dust tightly wind around the bright cen­ter of NGC 2787 in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Telescope.

Explore the con­cen­tric rings around this barred lentic­u­lar galaxy. Lens-shaped galax­ies, such as this one, don’t share the grand spi­ral arms of galax­ies like our Milky Way Galaxy or the Androm­eda Galaxy. NGC 2787 does show a faint bar. The bar is not appar­ent in this image, how­ever. While NGC 2787 isn’t as spec­tac­u­lar as other galax­ies, it does help astronomers while they look for clues about the process of galaxy for­ma­tion and the nature of black holes at the cores of galaxies.

As you zoom into the ring-like dust lanes, you may notice star-like objects around the galaxy. these are actu­ally glob­u­lar star clus­ters orbit­ing NGC 2787. Glob­u­lar clus­ters are tightly knit balls of stars. Hun­dreds of thou­sands of ancient stars are bound by grav­ity to form these clusters.

NGC 2787 lies about 24 mil­lion light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Ursa Major, the Big Bear. The galaxy itself is fairly small, span­ning about 4,400 light-years. By com­par­i­son, our Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light years across.