Galactic Zoo

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

Far away in the dark lies this diverse galac­tic zoo.

Explore this giant clus­ter of galax­ies known as Abell S0740. The mas­sive ellip­ti­cal galaxy, ESO 325-G004, looms largest at the cluster’s cen­ter. This galaxy is heav­ier than 100 bil­lion of our suns. Try and pick out any one of the thou­sands of fuzzy specs of light sur­round­ing ESO 325-G004. These are glob­u­lar clus­ters made up of hun­dreds of thou­sands of stars that are bound together by gravity.

Hun­dreds of other fuzzy ellip­ti­cal galax­ies dot the image. Some of the ellip­ti­cals, such as the one to the left and below ESO 325-G004 and above left, have a disk-like shape that cause them to resem­ble bow-ties. Other galax­ies have broad dust lanes cut­ting them through the cen­ter, resem­bling the planet Sat­urn. Many spi­ral galax­ies are seen in the image as well. New, blue stars dom­i­nate the spi­ral galaxy just below the giant ellip­ti­cal galaxy. Blue-colored stars usu­ally indi­cate recent star-birth. Older stars tend to be yel­low, orange and red. Explore the new star for­ma­tion among the yel­low stars in the spi­ral arms of the galaxy in the lower right. This galaxy has promi­nent dust lanes curv­ing grace­fully into a tight galac­tic core.

ESO 325-G004 dom­i­nates this clus­ter of galax­ies more than 450 mil­lion light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Cen­tau­rus.