This Optical Illusion Hubble Image Was 20 Years in the Making

Mar 24, 2025

Jeremy Gray

A luminous spiral galaxy with swirling arms full of stars and cosmic dust. A bright star with diffraction spikes is visible in the upper left, standing out against the galaxy's glowing core and intricate patterns. — ‘This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week features a sparkling spiral galaxy paired with a prominent star, both in the constellation Virgo. While the galaxy and the star appear to be close to one another, even overlapping, they’re actually a great distance apart,” NASA explains. | Image credits: ESA/Hubble and NASA, S. J. Smartt, C. Kilpatrick

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s latest image combines the work of two different instruments that captured photos of a sparkling spiral galaxy and a prominent star more than 20 years apart.

The image shows NGC 4900, a spiral galaxy, and a star. Even though the two objects look like they are close to each other or part of the same system, the star is located 7,109 light-years from Earth, and the spiral galaxy NGC 4900 is a whopping 45 million light-years away.

NASA explains that some of the final data shown in the new composite image was captured by NASA’s older Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, which was utilized on the space telescope from 1993 to 2009. The rest of the data was collected by the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which was installed in 2002 and remains in use today. The data was collected more than 20 years apart for two different observational programs, both focused on studying the deaths of massive stars in the Universe.

In one of the programs, researchers studied the locations of past supernovae, hoping to understand better the masses of stars that exploded and how supernovae interact with their cosmic surroundings. NGC 4900 is a good candidate for this type of research because it hosted a supernova, SN 1999br. As its name suggests, this supernova was discovered in 1999.

In the other program, researchers focused more on creating a good foundation by which they could study future supernovae. As part of this project, scientists collected images of more than 150 nearby galaxies. When researchers detect a supernova in any of these galaxies, they can refer to this catalog of images to better understand the star at the location of the supernova.

“Identifying a supernova progenitor star in pre-explosion images gives valuable information about how, when, and why supernovae occur,” NASA explains.