The Hubble Telescope imaged NGC 4731, a vibrant barred spiral galaxy 43 million light-years away, to understand its complex structures and their role in galaxy dynamics and star formation. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker
NGC 4731, a barred spiral galaxy in the Virgo cluster, is this week’s Hubble Picture of the Week. Featuring detailed colors and structures, the galaxy’s study may help explain how its bar and spiral arms influence star formation and matter dynamics.lies among the galaxies of the Virgo cluster, in the constellation Virgo, and is located 43 million light-years from Earth.put together, numbering around 60% of all galaxies.
This is the same process that maintains a galaxy’s spiral arms, but it is somewhat more mysterious for bars: spiral galaxies seem to form bars in their centers as they mature, accounting for the large number of bars we see today, but can also lose them later on as the accumulated mass along the bar grows unstable.
The orbital patterns and the gravitational interactions within a galaxy that sustain the bar also transport matter and energy into it, fueling star formation. Indeed, the observing program studying NGC 4731 seeks to investigate this flow of matter in galaxies.Beyond the bar, the spiral arms of NGC 4731 stretch out far past the confines of this close-in Hubble view. The galaxy’s elongated arms are thought to result from gravitational interactions with other, nearby galaxies in the Virgo cluster.
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