Spiral 5

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

The swirling arms of NGC 3310 blaze the num­ber five in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Telescope.

Explore the image of this active star­burst galaxy. New stars in most galax­ies form at a slow rate. Star­burst galax­ies churn out new stars at high rates. Red­der stars near the galaxy’s core are older stars while hot, young stars glow blue near the mid­dle and edges of the spi­ral arms. Clus­ters of these new stars are spread out all the way to the dim edges of the galaxy. Astronomers show that the ages of the stars range from one mil­lion to more than 100 mil­lion years. Sci­en­tists are unsure of what caused the star­burst activ­ity to turn on in NGC 3310. They used to believe that galaxy inter­ac­tions and col­li­sions were involved. But NGC 3310 shows that some other processes might be involved.

NGC 3310 lies about 59 mil­lion light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Ursa Major. The galaxy is about half the size of our Milky Way Galaxy with a diam­e­ter of about 52,000 light-years.