Hubble Sees a Spiral and a Star

Andrea Gianopoulos

March 14, 2025

A spiral galaxy seen face-on. Broken spiral arms made of blue patches of stars and thin strands of dark dust swirl around the galaxy’s center, forming a broad, circular disk. An extended circular halo surrounds the disk. At the disk’s center is a brightly glowing, pale-yellow, stubby, bar-shaped area. A bright star in our own galaxy, with long cross-shaped diffraction spikes, is visible atop the distant galaxy’s disk in the upper-left quadrant.

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Hubble Sees a Spiral and a Star

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the face-on spiral galaxy NGC 4900.ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. J. Smartt, C. Kilpatrick

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This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a sparkling spiral galaxy paired with a prominent star, both in the constellation Virgo. While the galaxy and the star appear to be close to one another, even overlapping, they’re actually a great distance apart. The star, marked with four long diffraction spikes, is in our own galaxy. It’s just 7,109 light-years away from Earth. The galaxy, named NGC 4900, lies about 45 million light-years from Earth.

This image combines data from two of Hubble’s instruments: the Advanced Camera for Surveys, installed in 2002 and still in operation today, and the older Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, which was in use from 1993 to 2009. The data used here were taken more than 20 years apart for two different observing programs — a real testament to Hubble’s long scientific lifetime!

Both programs aimed to understand the demise of massive stars. In one, researchers studied the sites of past supernovae, aiming to estimate the masses of the stars that exploded and investigate how supernovae interact with their surroundings. They selected NGC 4900 for the study because it hosted a supernova named SN 1999br.

In the other program, researchers laid the groundwork for studying future supernovae by collecting images of more than 150 nearby galaxies. When researchers detect a supernova in one of these galaxies, they can refer to these images, examining the star at the location of the supernova. Identifying a supernova progenitor star in pre-explosion images gives valuable information about how, when, and why supernovae occur.

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Media Contact:

Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland