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NASA – Holiday Wishes from the Hubble Space Telescope

Resembling festive lights on a holiday wreath, this NASA/ESA HubbleSpace Telescope image of the nearby spiral galaxy M74 is an iconic reminder ofthe impending season. Bright knots of glowing gas light up the spiral arms,indicating a rich environment of star formation.

Image above:

This Hubble image of M74 is a composite of Advanced Camera for Surveys datataken in 2003 and 2005. The filters used to create the color image isolatelight from blue, visible, and infrared portions of the spectrum, as well asemission from ionized hydrogen (known as HII regions).

Click image for enlargement.

Credit:

NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/HubbleCollaboration

Acknowledgment:

R. Chandar (University of Toledo) and J. Miller(University of Michigan)

Messier 74, also called NGC 628, is a stunning example of a "grand-design"spiral galaxy that is viewed by Earth observers nearly face-on. Its perfectlysymmetrical spiral arms emanate from the central nucleus and are dotted withclusters of young blue stars and glowing pink regions of ionized hydrogen(hydrogen atoms that have lost their electrons).

These regions of star formation show an excess of light at ultravioletwavelengths. Tracing along the spiral arms are winding dust lanes that alsobegin very near the galaxy's nucleus and follow along the length of the spiralarms.

M74 is located roughly 32 million light-years away in the direction of theconstellation Pisces, the Fish. It is the dominant member of a small group ofabout half a dozen galaxies, the M74 galaxy group. In its entirety, it isestimated that M74 is home to about 100 billion stars, making it slightlysmaller than our Milky Way.

The spiral galaxy was first discovered by the French astronomer, Pierre Méchain,in 1780. Weeks later it was added to Charles Messier's famous catalog ofdeep-sky objects.

A small segment of this image used data from the Canada-France-HawaiiTelescope and the Gemini Observatory to fill in a region that Hubble did notimage.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation betweenNASA and the European Space Agency. The Space Telescope Science Instituteconducts Hubble science operations. The institute is operated for NASA by theAssociation of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., Washington.

For more information, contact:

Ray Villard / Keith Noll

Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.

villard@stsci.edu / noll@stsci.edu

Lars Lindberg Christensen

ESA/Hubble, Garching, Germany

lars@eso.org