Star Scorpion

Credit: ESA/Hub­ble & NASA

A starry scor­pion reaches out for a galac­tic morsel in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Telescope.

Explore this dis­turbed spi­ral galaxy. Leave a note below describ­ing the shapes and pat­terns you see in this image. Blue patches of light woven through­out the tan­gled spi­ral arms of NGC 7673 are giant blue star clus­ters. The immense star clus­ters con­tain thou­sands of young stars.

Astronomers are not clear as to the cause of the new star for­ma­tion. One pos­si­bil­ity may be a near miss or col­li­sion between NGC 7673 and another galaxy. Another pos­si­bil­ity is an abun­dance of gas and dust within the galaxy. This could have led to a mas­sive star for­ma­tion. Sci­en­tists call this type of hyper star for­ma­tion a star­burst.

NGC 7673 is located about 150 mil­lion light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Pega­sus, the fly­ing horse. Two red­dish back­ground galax­ies also appear in the image with NGC 7673.