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Planetary News: Hubble Space Telescope (2007)New Image: Hubble Illuminates Cluster of Diverse GalaxiesFebruary 6, 2007
Looking out more than 450 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Centaurus, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took this image showing a diverse collection of galaxies in the cluster Abell S0740. Looming large at the cluster's center is the giant elliptical galaxy ESO 325-G004. The galaxy is as massive as 100 billion of our suns. This image also captured some of the thousands of globular star clusters orbiting ESO 325-G004. Globular clusters are compact groups of hundreds of thousands of stars that are gravitationally bound together. At the galaxy's distance they appear as pinpoints of light contained within the diffuse halo. Other fuzzy elliptical galaxies dot the image. Some have evidence of a disk or ring structure that gives them a bow-tie shape. Several spiral galaxies are also present. The starlight in these galaxies is mainly contained in a disk and follows along spiral arms. This image was created by combining Hubble science observations taken in January 2005 with Hubble Heritage observations taken a year later to form a 3-color composite. The filters that isolate blue, red and infrared light were used with the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard Hubble.
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