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Rich with detail and cosmic elegance, the spiral galaxy NGC 1309 glows like a celestial jewel in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. Located roughly 100 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus, NGC 1309 is a breathtaking showcase of the universe’s artistry.
In this image, its bluish young stars swirl gracefully in spiral arms, threaded with dark brown clouds of gas and dust, all circling a luminous pearly-white core. But the galaxy’s beauty doesn’t stand alone—Hubble’s gaze also captures hundreds of distant background galaxies scattered across space. Nearly every tiny smudge, streak, and glowing blob is itself a galaxy, some peeking through less dense patches of NGC 1309. Only one object breaks this galactic tapestry: a single foreground star near the top of the frame, identified by its distinctive diffraction spikes. This star, far closer to us, resides in our own Milky Way, just a few thousand light-years away.
Hubble has returned to NGC 1309 several times, releasing images in 2006 and 2014. Its interest is more than just visual—this galaxy has hosted two notable supernovae in recent decades.
The first, SN 2002fk, appeared in 2002 as a textbook Type Ia supernova, triggered when the stripped-down core of a dead star—a white dwarf—exploded in a brilliant flash.
The second, SN 2012Z, was far more unusual. While its spectrum resembled a Type Ia supernova, it was fainter than expected and was instead classified as a Type Iax supernova—a rare subclass. Hubble’s observations revealed that the white dwarf survived the blast, shining even brighter than before. Astronomers dubbed it a “zombie star”, and NGC 1309 became the first galaxy where scientists identified a star system before it went supernova, then later watched it produce such a peculiar explosion.
NGC 1309 is not just a beautiful pinwheel in space—it’s a cosmic storyteller, holding tales of stellar death, rebirth, and the mysteries that keep astronomers looking deeper into the night sky.