NASA’s New Hubble Galaxy Discovery: Spitzer’s Old Space Secrets and the Weird Galaxies Changing

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Space just dropped another episode of galaxies behaving badly and NASA's [music] Hubble Space Telescope caught the main character. Meet NGC 1266, a galaxy about 100 million light years away in the constellation Eridanus. In 2026, [music] NASA released a Hubble view showing this galaxy looking like it can't decide [music] what it wants to be. It's a lenticular galaxy, meaning it has a bright center and a flattened disc like a spiral galaxy, but no big spiral arms.

[00:00:25]Basically, it's the cosmic version of [music] dressing business casual to a black hole party. But here's where it gets wild. NGC [music] 1266 is also a rare post-starburst galaxy. That means it had a huge burst of star formation in the past, [music] then suddenly slowed down. Scientists think it may have merged with a smaller galaxy around 500 million years ago, which sent [music] gas toward its supermassive black hole.

[00:00:47]That black hole likely became more active and blasted out powerful winds and jets, pushing away star-forming gas.

[00:00:54]Translation, [music] the galaxy's black hole may have yelled, "No more babies."

[00:00:57]and shut down the star nursery. And NASA has been solving mysteries [music] like this for decades. The retired Spitzer Space Telescope studied the universe in infrared [music] light for more than 16 years. Spitzer helped reveal a giant faint ring around Saturn, studied distant galaxies, and played a major role in the TRAPPIST-1 system, where seven Earth-size planets [music] orbit one star. That's not a solar system, that's a cosmic apartment complex. Even [music] though Spitzer retired in 2020, its archived data is still helping scientists today. [music] So, yes, even retired NASA telescopes are more productive than most of us on a Monday morning. From Hubble's sharp galaxy portraits [music] to Spitzer's infrared detective work, NASA keeps proving the universe is not [music] empty. It is loud, messy, dramatic, and apparently full of galaxies going through emotional development. If you enjoyed this cosmic chaos, hit like, comment [music] which telescope you think is the real space MVP, and subscribe for more hilarious, mind-blowing universe facts.