This galaxy lies in the small northern constellation of the Hunting Dogs, about 16 million light-years away from our planet.
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According to Phys.org, the cause of this unusual shaped star-forming region is most likely a pressure wave going outwards from the galactic center, compressing the gas and dust in the outer region.
The second image was of Messier 96, a spiral galaxy that lies 35 million light-years away in the constellation of Leo.
Within the so-called starburst ring, new stars are forming at a rapid rate and many young, bright stars can be seen within it.
This photo of Messier 63 shows why it has earned the nickname the Sunflower Galaxy. It’s also in the Hunting Dogs constellation, but 27 million light-years away from us.
According to recent reports from NASA and the ESA, the Hubble Space Telescope has been able to take advantage of the recent opportunity to use gravitational lensing, an advantage which has now provided the largest sample of even the most faint and even the earliest galaxies we have ever seen in the Universe.
Hubble has also recently created stunning images of other galaxies in the Messier Catalog, a list of 110 galaxies, nebulas and star clusters observed and described by French astronomer Charles Messier in the 18th century.
An worldwide team of astronomers, led by Hakim Atek of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, has discovered over 250 tiny galaxies that existed only 600-900 million years after the Big Bang – one of the largest samples of dwarf galaxies yet to be discovered at these epochs. They used the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, in which the gravity from an object in the foreground bends the light of a smaller background object around so that scientists can detect it even though it is not in the plane of view.
A gravitational lens refers to a distribution of matter, such as cluster of galaxies, between the light source and an observer. This is around the time when stars began to form into clusters and formed the first galaxies.
In addition, study co-author Jean-Paul Kneib-who is also with the EPFL-says, “Clusters in the Frontier Fields act as powerful natural telescopes and unveil these faint dwarf galaxies that would otherwise be invisible”.
Reionization was the process of removing the hydrogen gas that cloaked much of the early universe. Ultraviolet light was now able to travel over larger distances without being blocked and the universe became transparent to ultraviolet light.
The scientists also determined that reionization epoch likely ended about 700 million years after the Big Bang (which occurred 13.82 billion years ago).
Astronomers think this is because gravity from other galaxies in the Messier group is pulling and twisting the material.
The latest data from Hubble can be used to map the early state of universe.
The results of the study will appear in the Astrophysical Journal.
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A few of these galaxies formed just 600 million years after the Big Bang and are fainter than any other galaxy yet uncovered by Hubble.
