NASA's Hubble spies on cool galaxy with a hot corona! - See pic

Image courtesy: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt

New Delhi: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has been instrumental in unearthing massive revelations about the solar system at large, including numerous galaxies that are a part of the space world.

With a keen eye for breakthroughs, Hubble has helped scientists reach out into the depths of the universe and discover things that would have, otherwise, been impossible.

With its hawk-like eye, the highly dependable telescope has spotted Galaxy NGC 6753 in a whirl of colour.

The bursts of blue throughout the spiral arms are regions filled with young stars glowing brightly in ultraviolet light, while redder areas are filled with older stars emitting in the cooler near-infrared.

However, NASA says that there's more to the image than meets the eye. According to the space agency, at 150 million light-years from Earth, astronomers highlighted NGC 6753 as one of only two known spiral galaxies that were both massive enough and close enough to permit detailed observations of their coronas.

Galactic coronas are huge, invisible regions of hot gas that surround a galaxy’s visible bulk, forming a spheroidal shape. Coronas are so hot that they can be detected by their X-ray emission, far beyond the optical radius of the galaxy. Because they are so wispy, these coronas are extremely difficult to detect.

Galactic coronas have been and are currently being studied extensively, in the hope of gaining a further understanding of galaxy formation. They are an example of tell-tale signs astronomers seek to help them determine how galaxies form.

However, considering how galaxies differ in shaping and sizing, no particular theory has been able to adequately illustrate how the galaxies in the Universe originally formed.