Anne’s Image of the Day: Spiral Galaxy NGC 406

December 1, 2013

NGC 406, a spiral galaxy in Tucana

Image Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA

NGC 406 is a spiral galaxy of about 60,000 light-years across, located some 61 million light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation of Tucana (the Toucan). It is receding from us at approximately 1508 kilometers per second.

Roughly half the diameter of the Milky way, this galaxy is quite similar to the well-known Whirlpool galaxy (Messier 51). As is usual for this kind of spiral galaxy, the spiral arms of NGC 406 are mainly populated by young, massive, bluish stars, while the yellowish central bulge is dominated by an older stellar population, which is less prominent and almost totally embedded in the disk structure. Dark dust lanes crisscross the entire galaxy.

The deep image also shows a significant number of more distant galaxies in the background. Some of them are visible as reddish fuzzy spots through the bluish spiral arms of the foreground galaxy.

This picture was created from images taken through near-infrared (F814W) and blue (F435W) filters, shown in red and blue respectively, using the Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope. The exposure times were twenty minutes per filter.