The NASA Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of the grand design spiral, NGC 3631.
The spiral galaxy is located some 53 million light-years away, in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major.
In the photo, the “arms” of the grand design spiral appear to wind around the galaxy’s nucleus.
“Close inspection of NGC 3631’s grand spiral arms reveals dark dust lanes and bright star-forming regions along the inner part of the spiral arms. Star formation in spirals is similar to a traffic jam on the interstate,” the agency said in a statement.
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“Like cars on the highway, slower moving matter in the spiral’s disk creates a bottleneck, concentrating star-forming gas and dust along the inner part of their spiral arms. This traffic jam of matter can get so dense that it gravitationally collapses, creating new stars (here seen in bright blue-white),” it said.
air-and-space represents visible wavelengths of blue light and the color orange represents infrared light.
The agency said that the image used data from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys.
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Earlier in the month, the Hubble Space Telescope team shared a collection of supernova host galaxies and has been sharing images of many more galaxies in recent weeks.
The telescope has been operational since its launch and deployment in 1990.
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Hubble has made more than 1.5 million observations over the course of its lifetime.
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It will soon be joined by the air-and-space that launched into orbit in December.
