(ORDO NEWS) — Taken with NASA / ESA‘s Hubble Space Telescope, this stunning image captures the galaxy NGC 105, which lies about 215 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Pisces.
Despite the fact that when looking at the photo it seems that another, neighboring galaxy is crashing into the galaxy NGC 105 from the side, in fact this is an illusion that arises when observing from our specific observation point. In fact, the elongated galactic neighbor of the galaxy NGC 105 is located much further away from us.
These observations, carried out with the Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, were carried out as part of a program aimed at studying nearby galaxies and include two very interesting astronomical objects – variable Cepheid stars and cataclysmic supernovae.
Although at first glance, these two phenomena may seem unrelated to each other – the first object belongs to an unusual class of pulsating stars, and the second is an explosion that occurs at the end of the life cycle of a massive star – in fact, they are united by the common function of a “standard candle”, performing which they help astronomers estimate cosmic distances.
Both Cepheids and supernovae have very well predictable luminosities. Therefore, the less bright one or another “standard candle” appears when observing from the solar system,
Galaxy NGC 105 contains both supernovae and Cepheid-type variables, so it allows you to calibrate two different methods for determining cosmic distances relative to each other.
Astronomers relatively recently analyzed the distances to several different galaxies, including NGC 105, and then determined the speeds of these galaxies to get an idea of the expansion rate of the universe – a value known as the Hubble constant.
The results obtained do not agree with the predictions made on the basis of the most popular cosmological model, and the analysis carried out by the authors shows that this discrepancy can be caused by a measurement error only with a probability of one in a million.
This discrepancy between measurements of galaxy parameters and predictions made on the basis of cosmological models is a big problem for astronomers, so these results confirm that something is wrong or something is missing in our standard explanation of the structure of the Universe.
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