Astronomers have discovered a new hybrid galaxy that’s been named UGC 12591. The galaxy is located around 400 million light years away in the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster and was picked up by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This is just one of the superclusters we know to be in existence and consists of a long chain of galaxy clusters which spans over hundreds of light-years. It’s been dubbed as a hybrid galaxy because astronomers discovered it possesses both spiral galaxy qualities, like our own Milky Way, but also showed lenticular galaxy qualities.
UGC 12591 is thought to be around four times the mass of the Milky Way making it about a hundred billion times more dense than the Sun. It spins much faster than our galaxy at a rate of around 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) per hour and doesn’t possess too many stars either. Now that the new galaxy’s been spotted, the next move for scientists is to analyze it using the Hubble to try and gain further insight into its origin and evolution.
The Hubble was launched in 1990, and since then it has provided valuable information about the Universe tat we probably would have never known had it not been for this marvelous technology. Astronomers will now use it to hone in on the hybrid galaxy UGC 12591 to try and decipher if it spread over a period of time or suddenly grew massive after colliding and merging with another. The answers to these secrets and more are about there; we just need to find them.
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