Today’s Image of the Day from the European Space Agency features NGC 4535, a spiral galaxy located about 50 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo.
This galaxy has picked up an unusual nickname over the years: the Lost Galaxy. Amateur astronomers gave it that name because, through smaller backyard telescopes, it just barely shows up at all.
Hubble’s view changes everything. With its 2.4-meter mirror, the telescope collects enough faint light to bring this ghostly object into sharp focus.
Suddenly, the galaxy’s arms appear well-structured. The bar of stars across its center stands out, and young clusters emerge in its outer lanes. A galaxy once dismissed as too dim turns into a surprisingly lively scene.
Scientists point out how much detail Hubble can extract from something so subtle. The teams behind these efforts include experts with the PHANGS program, a large project focused on the relationship between young stars and cold gas in nearby galaxies.
The team’s work illuminates features of NGC 4535 that were barely noticeable just a few years ago.
A galaxy filled with newborn stars
The latest image released through ESA and Hubble shows NGC 4535 filled with bright blue clusters spread across its spiral arms. These groupings mark areas packed with especially young stars.
Around many of these clusters sit glowing pink clouds. These are H II regions, and their color tells a story about powerful forces at play. They shine because hot, massive stars pump out so much high-energy radiation that the surrounding gas lights up.
According to ESA, these massive stars heat the clouds where they formed, send out fierce stellar winds, and later explode as supernovae. All of that activity changes the shape and motion of the gas around them.
These storms of energy create new patterns for future stars to follow. They also help carve out pockets of space where later generations of stars may rise.
One goal of the PHANGS program is to catalog around 50,000 of these H II regions across several nearby galaxies. It’s a huge effort meant to understand how star-forming environments differ from place to place.
Similar images were taken in 2021, but the newest release adds red nebular light from massive stars in their first few million years. That extra layer makes the galaxy feel less still and more alive.
Returning to the Lost Galaxy
NGC 4535 has been photographed before, but it continues to draw interest. It sits in a part of the sky that contains many galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, one of the nearest large clusters to Earth.
Because of that, researchers can compare galaxies that formed under different conditions yet remain close enough to observe in detail.
This kind of setting helps scientists figure out which features arise from a galaxy’s own behavior and which come from the environment around it.
Star formation is another reason the galaxy keeps showing up in new surveys. Hubble’s earlier snapshots hinted at busy activity, but this new set of observations shows more of the structure behind that activity.
The PHANGS program connects these star-forming regions to reservoirs of cold gas. The gas serves as the raw material for future stars.
Seeing both sides of the process helps scientists understand how long a galaxy can keep making new stars before it runs out of fuel.
One of the interesting things about NGC 4535 is that its star-forming areas are not all packed into one part of the galaxy. They show up in the arms, scattered in bright patches.
Each patch sits within a larger network of gas clouds. In places where the blue clusters meet the red nebulae, the galaxy reveals moments in the early life of young stars. Those moments change quickly, which makes capturing them valuable.
A fresh look at NGC 4535
The new image of NGC 4535 shows how much more we can learn when telescopes collect light that is too faint for human eyes.
The Lost Galaxy may appear almost invisible through a small telescope, but Hubble’s sensitivity brings out a wealth of detail.
Blue clusters, pink H II regions, and red nebular arcs combine into a portrait of a galaxy shaping itself through constant change.
A picture like this can be striking on its own, but it also fits into a bigger effort to understand how stars form and evolve. By pulling out features hidden in faint light, these images turn distant galaxies into manageable subjects.
The images let researchers see how energy moves from young stars into surrounding gas – and how those interactions build the next generation of stars.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Belfiore, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team
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