To celebrate the holiday season, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured a galaxy known as UGC 8091 that looks like a sparkly holiday snow globe. Millions of stars in this galaxy are being studied more thoroughly than ever before.

UGC 8091, also known as GR 8, is located about seven million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. Unlike other galaxies whose stars have a more regular appearance, astronomers classify UGC 8091 as an irregular galaxy. It is not difficult to understand why; The stars that make up this celestial cluster look more like a series of bright balls of light than a galaxy. While some irregular galaxies are thought to be entangled with each other due to violent internal activity, others are known to form as a result of interactions with neighboring galaxies. The result is a class of galaxies of various sizes and shapes, including a diffuse scattering of stars in this galaxy.

Notably, UGC 8091 is an irregular dwarf galaxy, meaning it contains only about a billion stars. That’s a huge amount of light, but not for a galaxy: Our Milky Way galaxy is thought to contain more than 100 billion stars, and other galaxies may contain trillions of stars! Dwarf galaxies often orbit larger galaxies, and their low mass makes them vulnerable to fragmentation and absorption by their larger neighbors; This is a process that creates distorted dwarf irregularities such as UGC 8091. Such galaxies are thought to have similar properties to a large galaxy. . ancient and distant galaxies that astronomers see in deep field images. It is hoped that examining the composition of dwarf galaxies and their stars, particularly their low metallicity, will help reveal evolutionary links between these ancient galaxies and more modern galaxies like ours.

To do this, astronomers carefully examined the multicolored stars of UGC 8091. Different features of the galaxy can be highlighted with the help of filters that limit the light entering the Hubble instruments to very specific wavelength ranges. These filtered images can then be combined to create a full color image; Twelve gorgeous filters are combined to create this image, using light from the mid-UV to the red end of the visible spectrum. The blooming red dots represent light emitted by excited hydrogen molecules in hot, energetic stars formed in recent stellar explosions. Other sparklers in this image are combinations of older stars.

The data used in this image spans from 2006 to 2021 and was obtained by Hubble’s two most advanced instruments: Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys. The observation programs aimed, among other things, to investigate the role of low-mass galaxies such as UGC 8091 in the reionization of the early universe and to study the effects of star formation in low-metal galaxies. Irregular dwarf galaxies, despite how small and deformed they are, have been found to contain as much information about our universe as any other celestial object in our sky.