© Photo: ESA / Hubble & amp; NASA / Judy Schmidt (Geckzilla)
MOSCOW, November 16 – RIA Novosti . Orbital observatory “Hubble” has received photos of an unusual galaxy NGC 3610 in the constellation Ursa Major, which just came out on the path of transformation from a spiral galaxy in the elliptical “star metropolis” and still contains the bright disk of billions of stars, the website of the telescope.
This galaxy was discovered the famous British astronomer William Herschel in 1793. It is located at a distance of 80 million years from the Milky Way, a relatively small distance on space standards, which makes it a convenient object for observing the evolution of galaxies and the individual groups of stars in them.
For a long time astronomers thought NGC 3610 normal elliptical galaxy, but in 1990, scientists discovered that it belongs to a rather small group of “star family”, located between elliptical and spiral galaxies.
NGC 3610 and other galaxies of this type are similar in shape to the usual elliptical “mega star”, but they contain the traces of his past life – remains of the spiral arms, dense central parts or even full discs of stars. In this form, according to the calculations of astrophysicists, NGC 3610 came to about 2-4 billion years ago.
The presence of such “atavism”, according to astronomers, says that they have elliptical galaxies, faced with other spiral galaxies, and we have not yet completed their transformation. For this reason, the study of NGC 3610 and its “sister” is of great interest to astronomers in general and the scientific team, “Hubble” in particular.
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