This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows UGC 10043, a spiral galaxy about 150 million light-years away in the constellation Serpens. Seen edge-on from Earth, its disk appears as a thin line with prominent dust lanes that obscure the galaxy’s glow.
The dust might outline the galaxy’s spiral arms if viewed from above. UGC 10043 is one of the rarer spiral galaxies observed from this angle.
Despite the dust obscuring much of the view, some active star-forming regions in UGC 10043 shine through. The galaxy’s center features a glowing, egg-shaped bulge, a common structure in spiral galaxies. This bulge houses stars orbiting the galactic center above and below the disk.
The bulge’s unusually large size compared to the disk may be due to UGC 10043 absorbing material from a nearby dwarf galaxy. This interaction also explains the warping of its disk, which bends upward at one end and downward at the other.
This Hubble image is a composite, combining several snapshots taken at different times and wavelengths of light. Notably, the two data sets used in this image were collected 23 years apart, in 2000 and 2023.
Hubble’s long mission allows the production of improved images of familiar targets and provides a valuable archive of data that has become increasingly useful to astronomers over time.
