Hubble Telescope Shares Portrait Of NGC 2775, The Most Confusing Galaxy

Portraits of hard-to-classify NGC 2775 galaxies (photo: dock. NASA)

JAKARTA Hubble, NASA's space telescope and the European Space Agency (ESA), shared a recent portrait of the 'confusing' galaxy, a call for galaxy NGC 2775.

This galaxy is said to be confusing because astronomers find it difficult to categorize its Galaxy. The galaxy, which is located about 67 million light-years from Earth, in the Cancer constellation, combines the characteristics of two major types of galaxies.

The center appears smooth and gas-free, similar to elliptical galaxies. However, the galaxy is also surrounded by dusty rings with uneven star clusters, which are characteristic spiral galaxies.

Because it is difficult to categorize, the researchers often debated the classification of this object. Some astronomers classify it as a spiral galaxy because of its hairy arms and dust, while others classify it as a lenticular galaxy.

The lenticular galaxy is a mixture of spirals and ellipticals. Astronomers are not sure about the process of forming lenticular galaxies. However, this object is thought to have originated in spiral galaxies that ran out of star-forming gas and lost their spiral arms.

There is evidence that supports the merging theory of NGC 2775, but this evidence is not evident in the latest Hubble imagery. In the old findings, the galaxy has a faint hydrogen gas tail that extends nearly 100,000 light-years.

This tail is believed to be the remnant of one or several galaxies that NGC 2775 later absorbed because of its too close distance. However, most astronomers classify NGC 2775 as a floculant spiral galaxy.

This classification was chosen because the galaxy appears to have an obscure and disjoint 'arm'. The appearance of these 'arms' is often described as 'buluated' or 'file' of scattered stars.