Hubble Spies on a Beautifully Messed-Up Galaxy
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Galaxies come in all shapes and sizes, but can generally be grouped into easily identifiable regular shapes, such as the elegant spirals or run-of-the-mill ellipticals. And then there are the irregular galaxies, which account for roughly a quarter of known galaxies, that are just kinda messy.

ANALYSIS: Galaxy Grows Monstrous X-Ray Tail

In this recent Hubble Space Telescope observation, one such irregular galaxy, located around 16 million light-years from Earth, has been observed. It looks like a loose collection of stars that have been thrown together and shuffled, like my end-of-semester university dorm room. But this galaxy, called NGC 5408, isn't just a scattering of stars, it's a whole galaxy and it's a galaxy with some interesting astronomical history.