Spiral Galaxy IC 3225: Celestial 'Cannonball' in Virgo | Hubble Space Telescope

Spiral Galaxy IC 3225: Celestial 'Cannonball' in Virgo | Hubble Space Telescope

The spiral galaxy appearing in this Hubble picture is named IC 3225. It looks remarkably like it has been launched from a cannon, speeding through space like a comet with a tail of gas streaming from its disc behind it. Appearances can be deceiving with objects so far from Earth—IC 3225 itself is about 100 million light-years away. However, the galaxy’s location suggests causes for this active scene, because IC 3225 is one of over 1,300 members of the Virgo galaxy cluster. The density of galaxies in the Virgo cluster creates a rich field of hot gas between them, the so-called ‘intracluster medium’. The cluster’s extreme mass has galaxies careening around its center in very fast orbits. Ramming through the thick intracluster medium, especially close to the cluster’s center, places an enormous ‘ram pressure’ on the moving galaxies that strips gas from them as they go.

IC 3225 is not so close to the cluster core right now. Nevertheless, astronomers have deduced that it has undergone this ram pressure stripping in the past. The galaxy looks as though it has been impacted by this. It is compressed on one side and there has been noticeably more star formation on this leading edge, while the opposite end is stretched out of shape. Being in such a crowded field, a close call with another galaxy could also have tugged on IC 3225 and created this shape. The sight of this distorted galaxy is a reminder of the forces at work on astronomical scales. It can move and reshape entire galaxies,

Image Description: A spiral galaxy. Its disc glows visibly from the center, and has faint dust threaded through it. A spiral arm curves around the left edge of the disc and is noticeably more dense with bright blue spots, where there are hot and new stars, than the rest. Opposite, the disc stretches out into a short tail where it covers a distant background galaxy. Around it, other distant galaxies and nearby stars are visible.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Sun

Release Date: Oct. 21, 2024

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