Hubble Space Telescope spots ‘Vermin Galaxy’

From the treasure trove of images captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the space agency released an image Friday that shows a distant galaxy as it begins it transit behind a star that lies much closer to Earth. The transit is of significance because it allows scientists to study the star HD 107146, which is very similar to the sun.HD 107146 is about 90 light-years away from Earth, and its physical properties are very similar to the sun. It has a mass of about 1.09 suns, and its size is about 99 percent that of the sun. But compared to the 4.6 billion years the sun has been around, this star is a youngster whose age is between 80 and 200 million years only. It also has a circumstellar disk of orbiting debris that appears as the numerous jagged spikes in the Hubble image. Given the star’s similarities to the sun, this disk — visible to us face-on — could be similar to the asteroids and the Kuiper belt in our solar system.
The “Vermin Galaxy” — which NASA said was a nickname coined by some astronomers to display their annoyance at its presence — is much farther away in space, compared to HD 107146. The pairing of the star and the galaxy was first observed by Hubble in 2004, and then again in 2011, and the latter image is the one NASA released Friday. A 2009 paper, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggested the presence of a planet at an orbital distance of 45-75 times the distance between Earth and the sun.

Hubble Space Telescope spots ‘Vermin Galaxy’