Hubble Sees Spiral Galaxy with Massive Star-Forming Arms

This view, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows a somewhat overlooked barred spiral galaxy known as NGC 1559.

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1559. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble.

First spotted by the Scottish astronomer James Dunlop in 1826, NGC 1559 is located approximately 32 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Reticulum.

Also known as LEDA 14814, ESO 84-10 and IRAS 04170-6253, the galaxy has massive spiral arms chock-full of star formation, and is receding from us at a speed of about 1,300 km/s.

NGC 1559 contains a mass of around 10 billion solar masses — while this may sound like a lot, that is almost 100 times less massive than our Milky Way Galaxy.

Although the galaxy appears to sit near the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, this is just a trick of perspective.

In reality, NGC 1559 is physically nowhere near the Large Magellanic Cloud in space — in fact, it truly is a loner, lacking the company of any nearby galaxies or membership of any galaxy cluster.

Despite its lack of cosmic companions, when this lonely galaxy has a telescope pointed in its direction, it puts on quite a show.

NGC 1559 has hosted a variety of spectacular exploding stars called supernovae, four of which astronomers have observed — in 1984, 1986, 2005, and 2009.

This image of NGC 1559 is a composite of separate exposures acquired by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instrument.

Four filters were used to sample various wavelengths.

The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter.

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