Sunny Priyan
NGC 3718, a distorted spiral galaxy, features a twisting dust lane that curves through its core, creating a stunning "S" shape captured in detail by Hubble.
The galaxy’s nucleus is hidden in visible and ultraviolet light but reveals itself in infrared, which penetrates the dense dust lane.
NGC 3718’s unique shape is believed to result from a gravitational interaction with the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 3729, 150,000 light-years away.
The interaction likely caused the reddish star formation extending toward 9 o’clock and the dark dust tendril reaching toward 7 o’clock in NGC 3718.
Hubble captured this image in infrared and visible light as part of a study on the central regions of disk-shaped galaxies with prominent stellar bulges.
The study aimed to explore the link between supermassive black hole mass and galactic bulge properties, and investigate star formation across galaxies from the nucleus to the disk.