#PPOD: The glittering galaxy in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is NGC 6951, located approximately 70 million light-years away in the constellation Cepheus.
As this Hubble image shows, NGC 6951 is a spiral galaxy with plenty of intriguing structures. Most eye-catching are its spiral arms, which are dotted with brilliant red nebulae, bright blue stars, and filamentary dust clouds.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. C. Ho, G. Brammer, A. Filippenko, C. Kilpatrick
The spiral arms loop around the galactic centre, which has a golden glow that comes from a population of older stars. The centre of the galaxy is also distinctly elongated, revealing the presence of a slowly rotating bar of stars.
NGC 6951’s bar may be responsible for another remarkable feature: a white-blue ring that encircles the very heart of the galaxy. This is called a circumnuclear starburst ring — essentially, a circle of enhanced star formation around the nucleus of a galaxy.
The bar funnels gas toward the centre of the galaxy, where it collects in a ring about 3800 light-years across. Two dark dust lanes that run parallel to the bar mark the points where gas from the bar enters the ring.
Learn more: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2025/10/Starbursting_centre
@setiinstitute is this Galaxy similar to our, with its new found barred structure? Will the Milky Way have a similar ring around its monstrous SMBH core?
SETI Institute
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