An asteroid has entered the galaxy image with the Hubble Space telescope. Here’s all you need to know.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured and shared some amazing glimpses of space. Sharing one of the Hubble images, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that the image was destroyed by a series of astronomical objects, in particular an asteroid. In the center of the image, the hazy shape of small galaxy UGC 7983 appears as a faint cloud of light and an asteroid can be seen as a row of four consecutive thin lines stretching from upper left corner.
“A variety of astronomical objects fill this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble telescope Spatial telescope. Background galaxies ranging from stately spirals to faint ellipses are scattered across the image, and bright foreground stars closer to home are also present, surrounded by diffraction spikes. In the center of the image, the hazy shape of the small galaxy UGC 7983 appears as faint. cloud of light. UGC 7983 is about 30 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo and is an irregular dwarf galaxy — one that is thought to be similar to the earliest galaxies in the Universe.” esahubble.org said in a report.
According to the information, the image also conceals an astronomical interloper. A small asteroid, only a few kilometers in diameter, can be seen running along the top left of this image. The asteroid’s trail is visible as four bright streaks separated by small gaps. These light trails represent four separate exposures that were combined to create this image, the small gaps between each observation needed to change the filters inside the Advanced Survey Camera’s Hubble.
The report says the capture of an asteroid is a lucky side effect of a larger effort to observe every known galaxy near the Milky Way. When this project was first proposed, about 75 percent of all of the Milky Way’s close neighbors were imaged by Hubble. A team of astronomers proposed using longer Hubble observations to take pictures of the remaining 25 percent.
