NASA's Hubble Space Telescope spots a gem of a spiral galaxy

The swirling enormity of spiral galaxies never gets old.

Captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and shared with the public on Friday, spiral galaxy IC 1954 is a drop-dead gorgeous celestial object that is helping scientists understand how young stars manifest from clouds of cold gas.

Spiral galaxy IC 1954 lies approximately 45 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Horologium (The Clock. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team

By combining this highly detailed image of the galaxy with radio data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, scientists can piece together a clearer picture of star formation, the European Space Agency explained in the image post.

IC 1954 is roughly 45 million light-years away from Earth, and Hubble's new-ish Wide Field Camera 3 was able to soak in both visible light and ultraviolet light from the galaxy over long exposures to give us this final product.

From a bright, active core extend its gaseous, dusty, star-filled arms, similar to our own Milky Way galaxy. As the galaxy spins, all that gas and dust continuously collides and congeals into stars, with leftover material making up planets, moons, asteroid belts, and all the other stuff you can come across in space.

This particular observation sets the stage for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, a combined effort from NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency set to launch this fall. It will be both the biggest and most technologically advanced space telescope in history.