Hubble Space Telescope Looks at Flocculent Spiral: NGC 2090

[Judi Lynn]

Nov 25, 2024 by Enrico de Lazaro


Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have captured an amazing new photo of the spiral galaxy NGC 2090.



This Hubble image shows NGC 2090, a spiral galaxy some 40 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Columba. The color image was made from separate exposures taken in the ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared regions of the spectrum with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). It is based on data obtained through six filters. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / D. Thilker.


NGC 2090 is a spiral galaxy located in the southern constellation of Columba.

Also known as ESO 363-23, IRAS 05452-3416 or LEDA 17819, it was discovered on October 29, 1826 by the Scottish astronomer James Dunlop.

“NGC 2090 is notable as a part of the group of galaxies studied in Hubble’s Extragalactic Distance Scale Key Project, which aimed to determine a new state-of-the-art value for the Hubble constant, one of the then-new telescope’s primary science goals,” the Hubble astronomers said in a statement.

“The contribution of NGC 2090 was in calibrating the Tully-Fisher (TF) distance method, by observing Cepheid variable stars in the galaxy.”

“The Cepheid-based measurement from that study in 1998 put NGC 2090 as 37 million light-years away.”

More:
https://www.sci.news/astronomy/hubble-flocculent-spiral-ngc-2090-13449.html

[electric_blue68]

1. Soooo pretty! I think it was in the early 1900's that we discovered that all those points of light in the night....

weren't all just stars...but some were whole galaxies!

Later, the bigger the telescopes the more galaxies we found.