NASA Hubble Images Reveal Stunning View of Twisted Spiral, Dancing Galaxies

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope continues to amaze its creators and other experts and enthusiasts with the images that it captures of the vast universe, which recently includes stunning images of a twisted spiral and dancing galaxies.

The dancing galaxies include the large spiral galaxy known as NGC 3227 and show it wrapped in a turbulent gravitation dance with its companion, the elliptical galaxy NGC 3226. The duo, collectively known as Arp 94, is relatively near our galaxy, roughly 50 to 60 million light-years away toward the constellation Leo, the Lion.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Images

A closer look at the area between the two galaxies reveals faint tidal streams of gas and dust that link the pair of cosmic bodies in their gravitational dance. The large spiral galaxy is labeled as a Seyfert galaxy, a type of galaxy with a very active nucleus.

Seyfert galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers, and as matter spirals into them, it releases vast amounts of radiation along the black hole's axis of rotation, which gives the galaxy its active nucleus, as per NASA.

The Hubble Space Telescope also photographed NGA 3718, a highly disturbed spiral galaxy with an unusual, warped shape that looks a bit like a plump letter "s" when viewed from Earth, with a thin thread of dark dust snaking through it.

Hubble's view of this portion of the galaxy shows the sinuous, twisting dust lane in detail as it sweeps by the core of the cosmic body and curves into the surrounding gas. The galaxy's gas and dust lanes are similarly distorted into this unique configuration.

According to the New York Post, these are only some of the amazing and stunning images that the Hubble Space Telescope has been able to capture since its launch. Recently, it captured an image of a river of star formation as four galaxies closely interact with each other.

Stunning Views of the Universe

The newly-revised image, which was originally released in 2010, shows a rare interaction between the cosmic bodies in the Hickson Compact Group 31. The space agency revealed the new image on May 17, with scientists referring to the pictured phenomenon as a river of star formation.

NASA said that the newly revised NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of a group of galaxies highlights streams of star-formation as four dwarf galaxies interact. In the top right center of the image lies a distorted group of bright, blue, and white stars. The area is called NGC 1741 and is actually two dwarf galaxies colliding with one another.

The space agency's telescope also captured the very first image of our galaxy's supermassive black hole core. The historic photograph does not portray a voracious cosmic destroyer but what astronomers have called a "gentle giant" on a near-starvation diet.

Experts believe that nearly all galaxies, including our Milky Way, have these giant black holes at their bustling and crowded center. At this point, light and matter cannot escape, making it extremely difficult to get images of them, ABC7 Chicago reported.

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Nasa, Hubble space telescope