NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope captures an image of a cosmic island known as spiral galaxy NGC 3430, which is located 100 million light-years away in the constellation Leo Minor. You can clearly see multiple galaxies relatively nearby to this one, just out of frame, with one being close enough that gravitational interaction is driving some star formation in NGC 3430.
NGC 3430 impressed Edwin Hubble so much that this galactic spiral ended up as part of the sample that he used to define his classification of galaxies. That’s right, his paper in 1926 classified some four hundred galaxies by their appearance — as either spiral, barred spiral, lenticular, elliptical or irregular. As for NGC 3430, it’s classified as an SAc galaxy, or spiral lacking a central bar with open, clearly-defined arms.
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At the time of Hubble’s paper, the study of galaxies in their own right was in its infancy. With the benefit of Henrietta Leavitt’s work on Cepheid variable stars, Hubble had only a couple of years before settled the debate about whether these ‘nebulae’, as they were called then, were situated within our galaxy or were distant and independent. He himself referred to ‘extragalactic nebulae’ in his paper, indicating that they lay beyond the Milky Way galaxy,” said the ESA.
