The Hubble Space Telescope obtained this week’s picture of the spiral galaxy NGC 4571, which is situated 60 million light-years distant in the region of Coma Berenices. The photograph was obtained using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, and it was released this week.
(Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team)
This picture was taken as part of a massive effort to gather data from Hubble as well as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, two of the most powerful telescopes in the world (ALMA). This massive equipment is made up of 66 high-precision transceivers located up in the Chilean Andes, which collectively view at frequencies ranging from infrared through radio waves. It is the world’s largest telescope. This enables ALMA to identify clouds of cold space dust, which are responsible for the formation of future stars.
When seeing objects at various wavelengths, the merging of Hubble plus ALMA scans is a powerful combo. Hubble’s sharp measurements at UV frequencies, on the other hand, enable scientists to identify the position of hot, brilliant, freshly born stars in the universe. Astronomers investigating star formation rely on the ALMA & Hubble data, which together serve as a key information bank.
ALMA, like Hubble, has also been utilized to examine a wide range of targets, ranging from faraway objects such as a sequence of planets in different phases of creation to things inside our own planetary system such as Jupiter and its complicated environment, among others. The array has also assisted in large-scale studies, such as the finding of a wealth of old, huge galaxies that provided information about the known universe’s origins in the early stages of its evolution.
In collaboration with Hubble and ALMA, the galaxy NCG 4571 was photographed as a portion of the PHANGS-HST program. The goal of this study is to understand more about how newborn stars arise from gas clouds by peering at galaxies in our local area.
