Credit: NASA, ESA, R.M. Crockett (University of Oxford, U.K.), S. Kaviraj (Imperial College London and University of Oxford, U.K.), J. Silk (University of Oxford), M. Mutchler (Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore), R. O'Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the WFC3 Scientific Oversight Committee

These images, taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, reveal fresh star birth in the ancient elliptical galaxy NGC 4150, located about 44 million light-years away. The images combine observations taken in visible light with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3. In this large-scale image, NGC 4150 looks very much like a typical elliptical galaxy. The dark strands of dust in the center, however, provide tentative evidence of a recent galaxy merger. The stars in the center area of this galaxyarea are less than a billion years old. By comparison, most of the stars in the outer regions of the galaxy are about 10 billion years old. These young stars most likely formed during an encounter with a smaller galaxy that was about one-twentieth the mass of NGC 4150. The Hubble observations bolster the emerging view that ancient elliptical galaxies like NGC 4150 harbor a significant amount of recent, merger-driven star formation.

Provider: Space Telescope Science Institute

Image Source: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2010/news-2010-38

Curator: STScI, Baltimore, MD, USA

Image Use Policy: http://hubblesite.org/copyright/