The photo appears at the NASA/ESA HubbleSite Web site.

The NCG 1672 Galaxy is located in the direction of the southern constellation Dorado. It is about 60 million light-years away. One light-year is the distance that light travels in vacuum in one year. Light travels about 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) in one second, so NGC 1672 is a quite long distance away from us. Actually, one light-year is equal to about 5,879,000,000,000 miles (or 5.879 trillion miles).

The photograph shows four major spiral arms that are connected to a large bar (which gives it the classification as a “barred” spiral galaxy). The bar contains fields of star-forming clouds and dark bands of interstellar dust. The largest activity of stars being created occurs near the ends of the large bar, what is called the starburst region of galaxies.

Both the Milky Way Galaxy and NGC 1672 are believed by astronomers to have a supersized black hole at their centers. NGC 1672 is a little bit smaller than the Milky Way. The primary disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is 80,000 to 100,000 light-years across and about 250,000 to 300,000 light-years in circumference. It contains between 200 and 400 billion stars.

A barred spiral galaxy is a special type of spiral galaxy (a galaxy with a central bulge that is surrounded by a disk and a spherical halo). It has a central bar-shaped structure that consists of stars, rather than a central bulge as in regular spiral galaxies. Because it has a bar in its center, the motion of its stars and interstellar gases are affected differently than with a regular spiral galaxy.

Hubble has helped to make astronomers much more knowledgeable as to the processes that go on within starburst regions of galaxies. A starburst region is a general astronomical term for a region of space that has an increased rate of star formation. It is predicted that the center of our Milky Way Galaxy will undergo a period of starburst activity in about 200 million years.

For additional information on the Hubble Space Telescope, see the ITwire article “As voted by astronomers: The ten best Hubble photographs” at: http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/8502/1066/

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