Some like it hot. Some are hot. Some are just hot messes. Most galaxies have a regular shape, typically a spiral or ellipse. They fit neatly into a category and astronomers know what to expect. One-fourth of all galaxies are more of the "you're drunk, go home" kind. Irregular galaxies, including NGC5408, thumb their starry noses at convention and give us a show with its glorious bouncer-attracting-slop. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a stellar "Snapchat" of star cluster Trumpler 14 from the corner of the bar.
NGC5408 was first recorded by John Herschel, an English polymath, in June 1834. For years, our neighbor - 16 million light years away - NGC5408 was labelled a planetary nebula, "an expelled cloud of material from an aging star," according to a press release. Instead, the rebellious wild child didn't do what astronomers thought it would... because it is an "entire galaxy, located about 16 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur)."
A real rebel wouldn't stop there and NGC5408 had some more surprises, namely its association with NGC5408 X-1, the best studied source (in its class) of an ultraluminous X-ray. "These rare objects beam out prodigious amounts of energetic X-rays," according to the press release. "Astrophysicists believe these sources to be strong candidates for intermediate-mass black holes. This hypothetical type of black hole has significantly less mass than the supermassive black holes found in galactic centers, which can have billions of times the mass of the sun, but have a good deal more mass than the black holes formed when giant stars collapse."
For more on Hubble's Servicing Mission 4, read a previous interview with former astronaut, Mike Massimino, a crewmember on that historic repair mission.
