Pieces of Fuzz

Credit: ESA/Hub­ble & NASA

With loose spi­ral arms, NGC 1345 resem­bles a piece of starry fuzz in this image from the NASA/ESA Hub­ble Space Telescope.

Explore the ragged spi­ral arms of NGC 1345. Astronomer John Her­schel dis­cov­ered NGC 1345 in 1835. He actu­ally describes it as a small and very faint cir­cu­lar fuzz. NGC 1345 has an elon­gated bar start­ing at the nucleus and extend­ing out. Spi­ral arms extend from the end of this bar. Astronomers call this type of galaxy a barred spi­ral. Our Milky Way Galaxy is likely a barred spi­ral galaxy. The cen­ter of the galaxy is dom­i­nated by older, yel­low stars. Near the edge of the galaxy, look for young blue stars and star clus­ters scat­tered along the spi­ral arms.

Take a closer look and smaller pieces of fuzz dom­i­nate this image. Many red­dish back­ground galax­ies with var­i­ous shapes dot the celes­tial land­scape. You can find spi­ral galax­ies, edge-on galax­ies, face-on galax­ies, irreg­u­lar galax­ies and galax­ies that are just faint smudges. Some shine through the glow of NGC 1345. And each of them con­tain bil­lions of stars. NGC 1345 galaxy is part of a group of galax­ies known as the Eri­danus Galaxy Clus­ter. The group of about 70 galax­ies lies 85 mil­lion light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Eri­danus, the River. That’s not so far away from the Milky Way Galaxy in astro­nom­i­cal terms. Near this loca­tion in the sky lies another great clus­ter of galax­ies known as the For­nax Galaxy Clus­ter. Together, these two clus­ters form a galac­tic super­clus­ter called the For­nax Super­clus­ter or the South­ern Supercluster.