【99 Moons】

Hubble's latest look into deep space9 Moonsa real dazzler.

This image, taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), features the spiral galaxy NGC 4680. At 2 o’clock and 7 o’clock two other galaxies can be seen flanking NGC 4680. NGC 4680 enjoyed a wave of attention in 1997, as it played host to a supernova explosion known as SN 1997bp. Amazingly, the supernova was identified by an Australian amateur astronomer named Robert Evans, who has identified an extraordinary 42 supernova explosions.  NGC 4680 is actually a rather tricky galaxy to classify. It is sometimes referred to as a spiral galaxy, but it is also sometimes classified as a lenticular galaxy. Lenticular galaxies fall somewhere in between spiral galaxies and elliptical galaxies. Whilst NGC 4680 does have distinguishable spiral arms, they are not clearly defined, and the tip of one arm appears very diffuse. Galaxies are not static, and their morphologies (and therefore their classifications) vary throughout their lifetimes. Spiral galaxies are thought to evolve into elliptical galaxies, most likely by merging with one another, causing them to lose their distinctive spiral structures. Credit:  ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et

Say hello to NGC 4680. This distant galaxy — it's more than 350 light-years away from Earth — is captured in beautiful detail and color by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3. NASA shared the freshly created image on Friday, highlighting the "neighboring" galaxies visible in the image (one on the right side of the frame and one at the bottom).

Let's not let those other galaxies steal the show, though. NGC 4680 is an interesting one because of how difficult it is to classify. It looks a bit like a spiral galaxy, and it may have more confidently been one long ago, but as the description points out, it's often referred to as a lenticular galaxy.

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Spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, tend do have clearly defined arms swirling and bending around a bright center (a supermassive black hole). Elliptical are roughly circular or oval in shape, and they also form around a supermassive black hole. But they're short on the gases and dust that help to form stars (and which also give spiral galaxies their more defined look).

SEE ALSO: If a scary asteroid will actually strike Earth, here's how you'll know

Galaxies aren't static stellar objects; they're in flux always, shaped by the physical forces that rule our universe. And it's believed that spiral galaxies, over time, transform into elliptical galaxies. It's during the middle period of the transformation that lenticular galaxies are formed.

You can probably get a sense of where that classification comes from in the above image. The arms are hazier and more melded together than you might see with a textbook example of a spiral galaxy. One of the outer arms even seems to dissolve into the surrounding space. If the theory that spiral galaxies evolve into elliptical galaxies is accurate, you may be seeing the early stages of that transformation happening here.

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