NASA's Hubble seizes a strange galaxy heading towards the Milky Way

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have released a dramatic image of Messier 90 in the constellation Virgo – a magnificent spiral galaxy located about 60 million light-years from our own Milky Way.

This galaxy is particularly interesting for astronomers because it is one of the few that has been observed traveling to the Milky Way, and not out of the way.
Scientists know this because the light from the galaxy is "moved to blue".

This basically means that the wavelength of this light is compressed as it gets closer to us, thus decreasing the wavelength and pushing it towards the blue end of the visible spectrum. .

This shift of the blues contrasts with the way we see most galaxies in the universe. As space is constantly expanding, the vast majority of galaxies we see are moving away from us. As a result, their light is "redshift", which means that it undergoes an increase in the wavelength that pushes it toward the red end of the spectrum.

Messier 90 is part of the Virgo group – a vast collection of galaxies with more than 1,200 known members. This is the largest group of galaxies closest to the Milky Way.

Scientists believe that the particular direction of Messier 90 could be explained by the enormous mass of the cluster in which it resides. Such a mass would be able to accelerate individual galaxies at high speeds, sending them into strange orbits that could lead them to us and move them away with time.

All in all, the group of the Virgin is moving away from us and many of the galaxies it houses seem to travel at a very high speed in this direction. However, some of its galaxies, such as Messier 90, move at high speed in the opposite direction; they seem to be heading towards the Earth.

The Messier 90 image was captured by Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, which collects a combination of infrared, ultraviolet and visible light. It was operational from 1994 to 2010.

Hubble, which is operated jointly by NASA and ESA, was launched in 1990 and has since been responsible for producing some of the most dramatic images in our universe. Although it is not the first space observatory to be launched, it is one of the largest and most versatile yet in use.