Nearby star photobombs portrait of a distant galaxy in new Hubble Telescope image

A blue tinted spiral in space. It is very sparkly and seen slightly edge-on. At the center, a bright spot.

A bright star located about 10,000 light-years from Earth overlaps with the bright core of a more distant galaxy, NGC 5530, which is located 40 million light-years from Earth. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker)

A bright star within our Milky Way galaxy photobombed a beautiful new image of a distant galaxy with "patchy" spiral arms.

The galaxy, NGC 5530, is located 40 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Lupus. The Hubble Space Telescope captured a new image of NGC 5530, which is classified as a flocculent spiral galaxy due to its patchy and indistinct arms, according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA).

Near the center of the image is a bright point of light, not to be confused with the galaxy's luminous core. Rather, the bright point is a star located much closer to Earth — within our own galaxy, in fact — only 10 thousand light-years away. It exhibits a cross-like pattern known as diffraction spikes, caused by the star's light bending around Hubble's internal support structure.

"While some galaxies have extraordinarily bright centers where they host a feasting supermassive black hole, the bright source near the centre of NGC 5530 is not an active black hole but instead a star," ESA officials said in the statement.

The bright star in the foreground of the image and the distant galaxy are not physically related or interacting in space. The star appears to overlap with the galaxy because it just so happens to lie along Hubble's line of sight.

A full version of the image. (A blue tinted spiral in space. It is very sparkly and seen slightly edge-on. At the center, a bright spot.) — A bright star located about 10,000 light-years from Earth overlaps with the bright core of a more distant galaxy, NGC 5530, which is located 40 million light-years from Earth. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker)

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"This chance alignment gives the appearance that the star is at the dense heart of NGC 5530," ESA officials said in the statement.

The recent Hubble image captures NGC 5530 tilted at a slight angle. Surrounding the galaxy’s bright core are swirling webs of dark, reddish dust and sparkling blue patches where new stars have formed. Localized bursts of star formation have created the galaxy's fragmented arms that look like clumps rather than the well-defined, continuous arms of a grand design spiral galaxy.

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Samantha Mathewson joined Space.com as an intern in the summer of 2016. She received a B.A. in Journalism and Environmental Science at the University of New Haven, in Connecticut. Previously, her work has been published in Nature World News. When not writing or reading about science, Samantha enjoys traveling to new places and taking photos! You can follow her on Twitter @Sam_Ashley13.