UGC 2885: Gigantic 'Godzilla galaxy' spotted by NASA's Hubble telescope
Source: CNET
Gigantic 'Godzilla galaxy' spotted by NASA's Hubble telescope
UGC 2885 is a monster.
Jackson Ryan
January 5, 2020 3:35 PM PST
Meet the king of galaxies: UGC 2885. It's positively monstrous. It's a giant with a sleepy supermassive black hole at its center, and it's so big it's probably the biggest galaxy in the local universe. At 463,000 light-years across, it's about two and a half times wider than our home galaxy, the Milky Way, and contains about 10 times as many stars.
The gigantic system might earn UGC 2885 the nickname "Godzilla galaxy," according to NASA, and researchers at the University of Kentucky are trying to work out just how the galaxy grew to such mammoth proportions.
"How it got so big is something we don't quite know yet," said Benne Holwerda, an astronomer investigating the sleeping giant. "It's as big as you can make a disk galaxy without hitting anything else in space."
UGC 2885 has been known to astronomers for a number of years, and its rotation was measured by astronomer Vera Rubin in the 1980s. For that reason, and because of personal interactions with Rubin, Holwerda has nicknamed the galaxy in her honor, rather than giving it the fearsome Godzilla tag.
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This Hubble Space Telescope photograph showcases the majestic spiral galaxy UGC 2885, located 232 million light-years away in the northern constellation Perseus. The galaxy is 2.5 times wider than our Milky Way and contains 10 times as many stars. A number of foreground stars in our Milky Way can be seen in the image, identified by their diffraction spikes. The brightest star photobombs the galaxy's disk. The galaxy has been nicknamed "Rubin's galaxy," after astronomer Vera Rubin (1928 – 2016), who studied the galaxy's rotation rate in search of dark matter.
Credits: NASA, ESA and B. Holwerda (University of Louisville)
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