Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Dalcanton and B. Williams (University of Washington, Seattle)

NGC 2976 resides on the fringe of the M81 group of galaxies, located about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. This image, taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows that the galaxy does not look like a typical spiral galaxy. In the galaxy's inner region, there are no obvious spiral arms. Dusty filaments running through the disk show no clear spiral structure. A raucous interaction with a neighboring group of hefty galaxies stripped away some gas and funneled the rest to the galaxy's inner region, fueling star birth about 500 million years ago. At the same time, the galaxy's outer regions stopped making stars because the gas ran out. Now, the inner disk is almost out of gas as new stars burst to life, shrinking the star-formation region to a small area of about 5,000 light-years around the core. The Hubble image can resolve hundreds of thousands of individual stars. What look like grains of sand in the image are actually single stars.

Provider: Space Telescope Science Institute

Image Source: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2010/news-2010-05

Curator: STScI, Baltimore, MD, USA

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