Spectacular dust

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hub­ble Her­itage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Col­lab­o­ra­tion. Acknowl­edg­ment: R. OCon­nell (Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia) and the WFC3 Sci­en­tific Over­sight Committee

With a wide swath of thick dust hid­ing its mid­dle, Cen­tau­rus A dazzles.

Explore the dusty lanes and wisps of pink gas in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope. What shapes or sto­ries do you see in this image? Leave a note below.

The galaxy’s thick dust hides a bright mid­dle. As we travel out from the older, yel­low stars of the cen­ter, look for tight clus­ters of stars and patches of pink. These glow­ing fields of hydro­gen gas are stel­lar nurs­eries sim­i­lar to the Great Neb­ula in Orion or the Eagle Neb­ula. New stars born within these clouds send out tor­rents of ultra­vi­o­let light that excite atoms within the neb­u­lae and cause them to glow. Near the edge of the galaxy, look for a dust­ing of young, blue stars. As you scan around you might notice a bright star smack in the mid­dle of the image. This is a star within own Milky Way Galaxy that is posi­tioned between us and Cen­tau­rus A.

Cen­tau­rus A, or NGC 5128, is one of the most stud­ied objects in the south­ern sky. The spec­tac­u­lar band of dust is thought to be all that is left over after a small spi­ral galaxy col­lided with a larger ellip­ti­cal galaxy between 200 mil­lion to 700 mil­lion years ago.

Astronomers cap­tured the most detailed ever view of this galaxy with the new Wide Field Cam­era 3 aboard the Hub­ble tele­scope. The image shows us close-up details in vis­i­ble light. It also shows objects that glow in other wave­lengths of light, such as ultra­vi­o­let light and near infrared. This offers a peek at new stars that are hid­den deep within the galaxy’s thick dust band.

Cen­tau­rus A is located fairly close to us, about 11 mil­lion light-years away toward the con­stel­la­tion Cen­tau­rus, the Centaur.