NASA Captures Striking Image of Galaxy NGC 7456, 51 Million Light-Years Away

With the naked human eye, this cosmic stuff looks like nothing more than a fuzzy oval, but the bright stripe in the middle can tell scientists a lot about the tawdry past of star formation in a galaxy. The galaxy NGC 7456 is located more than 51 million light-years away in the constellation Grusthe Crane. The picture also shows some of the galaxy's looser outer regions, where the patchy spiral arms give way to a far more disorderly distribution of stars and dust, and dust lanes in which embedded, darker material winds and weaves its way around the arms of the galaxy.

Young Star Clusters, Star-Forming Regions and Dust in NGC 7456

As per NASA, this week, Hubble released an observing program that aims to study the galaxy's low-density gas and dust with that same data. It allows for images of developing stars and frigid, compact clouds of hydrogen gas that coalesced to form stars, and to see how the galaxy has changed.

Ex-ray puzzles and the active galactic nucleus X-rays

Hubble is not the only telescope to spy NGC 7456. This is just one of many that are observing this plucky galaxy across visible, ultraviolet, and select sub-mid-infrared wavelengths! UlXs are so hot right now. The galaxy had been observed multiple times by ESA's XMM-Newton satellite, which discovered several so-called ultraluminous X-ray sources.

These small, dense things blast out far more X-rays than their size should allow, researchers would have thought. Astronomers are still trying to understand what powers these extreme objects, he said, and NGC 7456 adds a few more examples.

Even the area surrounding the supermassive black hole at its heart is unusually bright and active, making NGC 7456 an active galaxy. It doesn't matter from which angle you view it (whether it is at its heart or at its edge, within the visible spectrum or in X-rays) this galaxy will continue to fascinate for years to come.