Hubble uncovers a cosmic giant: A long-armed galaxy around 450 million light-years away

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows ESO 415-19, a peculiar spiral galaxy that lies about 450 million light-years away from Earth. Its center looks like a typical spiral galaxy, but its extended spiral arms, created by a past interaction, give it an unusual shape. These arms appear to be stretched out from the galactic core, giving the galaxy a peculiar look.

In the above image by Hubble, the spiral galaxy has a luminous core surrounded by patches of dark dust, and its spiral arms are dimmer and have a cooler hue, with some bright blue spots. Extending from the galaxy's arms are faint tidal streams, one reaching the top of the frame and the other curving down to the bottom-left corner. In the top-right corner is a smaller, orange elliptical galaxy, and the background is filled with many tiny stars and galaxies.

1/ 🎄 Our Picture of the Week brings you a cosmic candy cane — spiral galaxy ESO 415-19, which lies around 450 million light-years away. pic.twitter.com/4VwcC0hzkz

— HUBBLE (@HUBBLE_space) December 26, 2022

ESO 415-19's uniqueness made it an ideal subject for Hubble to observe. This observation is part of an ongoing effort to study the Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, a collection of some of the strangest and most remarkable galaxies in the universe - ranging from solitary peculiar galaxies to spectacularly interacting pairs, triplets, and even quintets.

Since its launch in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope, a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency, has been sending back stunning images that have revolutionized humanity's comprehension of the cosmos. The observatory has peered back into our universe’s distant past, to locations more than 13.4 billion light-years from Earth, showing the merging of galaxies, the supermassive black holes within them, and aiding the scientific community in comprehending the evolution of the universe.