Photo credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Kilpatrick
NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured an interesting image of the brushstroke-like irregular galaxy NGC 2814 located 85 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. We can observe a narrow streak of stars being crossed by faint dust lanes and surrounded by a bright glow, appearing like a beam of light in the center.
If you look closer, NGC 2814 has a few galactic neighbors including a side-on spiral galaxy known as NGC 2820; an irregular galaxy named IC 2458; and a face-on non-barred spiral galaxy called NGC 2805. These four galaxies that you see in this image make up a galaxy group known as Holmberg 124, also known as a group of ‘late-type galaxies’. ‘Late-type’ refers to spiral and irregular galaxies, while ‘early-type’ denotes elliptical galaxies.
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Hubble actually adopted the terms ‘early-type’ and ‘late-type’ from much older astronomical terminology for stellar classifications, and did not mean to state that ellipticals were literally evolutionary precursors to spiral and irregular galaxies. In fact, he explicitly said in his 1927 paper that ‘the nomenclature…[early and late]…refers to position in the sequence, and temporal connotations are made at one’s peril’,” said the ESA.
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