File:Viewing the Vermin Galaxy.jpg

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Credit/Provider	ESA/Hubble & NASA
Source	ESA/Hubble
Short title	Viewing the Vermin Galaxy
Image title	The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is famous for its jaw-dropping snapshots of the cosmos. At first glance this Picture of the Week appears to be quite the opposite, showing just a blur of jagged spikes, speckled noise, and weird, clashing colours — but once you know what you are looking at, images like this one are no less breathtaking. This shows a distant galaxy — visible as the smudge to the lower right — as it begins to align with and pass behind a star sitting nearer to us within the Milky Way. This is an event known as a transit. The star is called HD 107146, and it sits at the centre of the frame. Its light has been blocked in this image to make its immediate surroundings and the faint galaxy visible — the position of the star is marked with a green circle. The concentric orange circle surrounding HD 107146 is a circumstellar disc — a disc of debris orbiting the star. In the case of HD 107146 we see the disc face-on. As this star very much resembles our Sun, it is an interesting scientific target to study: its circumstellar disc could be analogous to the asteroids in our Solar System and the Kuiper belt. A detailed study of this system is possible because of the much more distant galaxy — nicknamed the “Vermin Galaxy” by some to reflect their annoyance at its presence — as the star passes in front of it. The unusual pairing was first observed in 2004 by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, and again in 2011 by Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. The latter image is shown here, as the Vermin Galaxy began its transit behind HD 107146. The galaxy will not be fully obscured until around 2020, but interesting science can be done even while the galaxy is only partly obscured. Light from the galaxy will pass through the star’s debris discs before reaching our telescopes, allowing us to study the properties of the light and how it changes, and thus infer the characteristics of the disc itself.
Usage terms	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Date and time of data generation	06:00, 29 May 2017
File change date and time	11:23, 28 November 2016
Date and time of digitizing	14:01, 24 November 2016
Date metadata was last modified	12:23, 28 November 2016
Unique ID of original document	xmp.did:c4ffb57f-57b6-2047-ba9e-b34a0d3db06a
Keywords	Vermin Galaxy
Contact information	http://www.spacetelescope.org Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 2 Garching bei München, , D-85748 Germany
IIM version	4

File:Viewing the Vermin Galaxy.jpg

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