It looks a bit like a boat, or a stout fedora. So what the hell is this rusty brown gossamer of a space cloud? If we’re being perfectly specific, it’s the lenticular galaxy NGC 4753, which sits about 60 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The above image was snapped by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope; the telescope views the galaxy nearly edge-on, meaning we are observing it from the side, across its diameter, rather than from above, which would reveal its full structure.
Lenticular clouds are elliptical—on Earth as they are in heaven. Fittingly lenticular clouds sometimes get compared to, or even mistaken for, flying saucers. After all, they’re pretty alien compared to our normal, fluffy cumulus clouds.
Lenticular galaxies have poorly defined spiral arms, making them look more like oblong blobs than the . In case you were at risk of losing your sense of scale, NGC 4753 is part of a cloud in the constellation Virgo that is made up of about 100 galaxies and galaxy clusters. The universe is a big, big place, and this lenticular galaxy is just a gas station on one of the universe’s feeder roads.
NGC 4753 is thought to be the result of a galactic merger, between itself and a dwarf galaxy some 1.3 billion years ago. The crispy brown lines of dust seen in the image probably took shape due to the merger, according to a .
The new image of the galaxy is the sharpest view of it yet, dating back to its discovery in 1784. Most of the galaxy’s mass i.
