Pop science

In the 1950s, when amateur astronomer Leland S. Copeland first fixed his telescope lens on a distant galaxy in Virgo, he saw an eerie spiral shrouded in dust. Copeland, a poet fond of writing about the cosmos, dubbed the spiral the ‘Lost Galaxy’, a name that stuck. Scientists know this galaxy as NGC 4535, one of the largest of the 2,000 or so galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, located about 50 million light years from Earth. When recently viewed through Hubble, the haze that clouded Copeland’s Lost Galaxy vanished to reveal a vibrant sea of stars not so different from the Milky Way.

Like our home galaxy, the Lost Galaxy is a barred spiral: a vast swirl of stars with a distinct bar structure at its centre. The colours of those stars can tell us a bit about the galaxy’s history. The yellowish glow of the galaxy’s central bulge points the way to the Lost Galaxy’s oldest and coldest retinue of stars; meanwhile, bright-blue clouds clustered together in the galaxy’s spiral arms reveal where its hottest, youngest stars congregate, lighting up the gas and dust around them.

Today the Lost Galaxy is not hard to find. Its long, elegant arms make it a prime candidate for studying the structure of spiral galaxies. NASA released the image below on 11 January as part of an ongoing survey of 38 spiral galaxies located within 75 million light years of Earth. BRANDON SPECKTOR