The Advanced Camera for Surveys (or ACS), one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s advanced instruments, has taken a spectacularly detailed image of a galaxy called SBS 1415+437.

Discovered in 1995 by a team of astronomers from the United States and Ukraine, SBS 1415+437 lies in the constellation Boötes at a distance of about 45.3 million light-years.

It is a galaxy type known as a cometary blue compact dwarf galaxy.

Astronomers initially thought that SBS 1415+437 was a truly young galaxy that did not start to form stars until 100 million years ago, but a recent study has suggested that the galaxy is in fact older, containing stars 1.3 billion years old.

SBS 1415+437, otherwise known as PGC 51017, SBSG 1415+437 or SDSS CGB 12067.1, also belongs to a rare group of starburst galaxies called Wolf–Rayet galaxies.

The galaxy has an unusually high number of extremely hot and massive Wolf–Rayet stars.

These stars are among the largest and shortest lived stars known, typically over 20 solar masses with surface temperatures well over 25,000 K.

Many of the brightest and most massive stars in the Milky Way are Wolf–Rayet stars.

These massive stars are in the stage of their stellar evolution where they undergo heavy mass loss.

A typical Wolf–Rayet star can lose a mass equal to that of our Sun in just 100,000 years.

Because of this it is unusual to find more than a few of these stars per galaxy – except in Wolf–Rayet galaxies, like the one in this image.