This long tail probably formed after a collision with another galaxy.

The Tadpole System is located 420 million light-years from Earth. That’s about 150 times farther than the Andromeda galaxy. This weekend, this beautiful Hubble photo from 2002 is the space photo of the week. It was one of the first pictures taken with the brand new Advanced Camera for Surveys, which was installed in 2002 by astronauts during service mission 3B. This camera only works partially: one of the three channels – the high-resolution channel (HRC) – is disabled and cannot be repaired.

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The cosmic tadpole – also called UGC 10214 – is a so-called barred spiral galaxy. A barred spiral galaxy has spiral arms, only these arms do not come from the center, but from a bar that runs through the center. One of the best known barred spiral galaxies is NGC 1300, which was photographed by the Hubble telescope in 2004. Astronomers don’t yet know exactly how barred spiral galaxies form. By the way, did you know that our own Milky Way is also a barred spiral galaxy? However, the Milky Way has a much shorter bar than many other known congeners.

The image of the Tadpole system shows a very long tail, measuring 280,000 light-years in length. In comparison, the Milky Way is over 100,000 light-years across, so our own galaxy could be glued together three times. The tail was created after a collision with a compact galaxy. This galaxy is located 300,000 light-years behind UGC 10214 and is not clearly visible in this image. The tail is made up of stars, dust and gas that have been ripped out of the galaxy. In addition, this image of the Tadpole System shows roughly 6,000 distant galaxies. These galaxies are many billions of light years away from Earth. Thanks to the brand new ACF camera in 2002, thousands of additional galaxies have been found. Just imagine what we will see when Hubble’s successor – the James Webb telescope – opens its eyes and zooms in on this galaxy. We can’t wait!

Over the past decades, space telescopes and satellites have captured beautiful images of nebulae, galaxies, stellar nurseries and planets. Every weekend we remove one or more impressive space photos from the archive. Enjoy all the photos? View them on this page.