New Delhi: The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the spiral galaxy IC 3225 at a distance of 100 million lightyears from the Earth. The spiral galaxy has been distorted by the tremendous forces at work within galaxy clusters. IC 3225 belongs to the Virgo cluster of galaxies, which contains over 1,300 galaxies. The energies pouring out of the stars from all these galaxies heats up the gas in the intracluster medium. The cold gas, the raw material for star formation within galaxies is removed by the warm gas as the galaxies pass through the central regions of galaxy clusters, through a process known as ram pressure stripping.
While IC 3225 is not close to the central regions of the galaxy cluster today, but bears signs of having gone through the ram pressure stripping process. The galaxy is compressed on one side, with the redistribution of material encouraging the formation of new stars. As a result, the fringes of the galaxy on one side is brimming with stellar nurseries producing newborn stars at a furious rate. The other end of the galaxy is stretched out and distorted. The shape of the galaxy could also have been created because of the gravitational influences of other galaxies in the Virgo galaxy cluster.
A signature of Hubble
Just like most of the astronomical images captured by Hubble, the target galaxy is sitting in a field of even more distant galaxies of all shapes and sizes, some of which are interacting. There are cross-shaped diffraction spikes that only appear over the brightest and most concentrated sources of light. These diffraction spikes are caused by light from the distant objects interacting with the internal support structure of the telescope. These diffraction spikes are unique to Hubble and can be considered its signature. The images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope have six-pointed diffraction spikes because of the hexagonal mirror segments and the tripodal internal support structure.
