Hubble spies a stately spiral galaxy

The stately sweeping spiral arms of the spiral galaxy NGC 5495 are revealed by the NASA/ESA Hubble House Telescope’s Extensive Area Digicam 3 on this picture. NGC 5495, which lies round 300 million light-years from Earth within the constellation Hydra, is a Seyfert galaxy, a sort of galaxy with a very brilliant central area. These luminous cores—recognized toastronomers as energetic galactic nuclei—are dominated by the sunshine emitted by dust and gasoline falling right into a supermassive black hole.

This picture is drawn from a sequence of observations captured by astronomers finding out supermassive black holes lurking within the hearts of different galaxies. Finding out the central areas of galaxies will be difficult: in addition to the sunshine created by matter falling into supermassive black holes, areas of star formation and the sunshine from current stars all contribute to the brightness of galactic cores. Hubble’s crystal-clear imaginative and prescient helped astronomers disentangle the assorted sources of sunshine on the core of NGC 5495, permitting them to exactly weigh its supermassive black hole.

In addition to NGC 5495, two stellar interlopers are seen on this picture. One is simply exterior the middle of NGC 5495, and the opposite could be very distinguished alongside the galaxy. Whereas they share the identical location on the sky, these objects are a lot nearer to residence than NGC 5495: they’re stars from our personal Milky Way. The bright stars are surrounded by criss-cross diffraction spikes, optical artifacts created by the interior construction of Hubble interacting with starlight.