Hubble Captures Image of Remarkable Galaxy UGC 12591

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has delivered a stunning snapshot of the strange giant galaxy UGC 12591.

This image, taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 on board the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the galaxy UGC 12591, located roughly 400 million light-years away in the constellation of Pegasus. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble.
Classified as an S0/Sa galaxy, UGC 12591 sits somewhere between a lenticular and a spiral galaxy.
Also known as LEDA 71392 and 2MASX J23252175+2829425, UGC 12591 lies just under 400 million light-years away from us in the westernmost region of thePisces-Perseus Supercluster, a chain of galaxy clusters that stretches out for hundreds of millions of light-years — one of the largest known structures in the cosmos.
UGC 12591 itself is also extraordinary — it is incredibly massive.
The galaxy and its halo together contain several hundred billion times the mass of the Sun — four times the mass of our own Milky Way Galaxy.
UGC 12591 also whirls round extremely quickly, rotating at speeds of up to 1.12 million mph (1.8 million km per hour).
Observations with Hubble are helping astronomers to understand the mass of UGC 12591, and to determine whether the galaxy simply formed and grew slowly over time, or whether it might have grown unusually massive by colliding and merging with another large galaxy at some point in its past.
This new image is made up of observations from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3(WFC3) in the near-infrared and optical parts of the spectrum.
Two filters — a broad V-band (F606W) filter and a near-infrared (F814W) filter — were used to sample various wavelengths.
The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter.
(From: http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/hubble-galaxy-ugc-12591-04653.html)
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