Hubble images a gorgeous spiral galaxy with a brightly glowing heart

By Georgina Torbet September 18, 2022

Another stunning image of the wonders of space was shared this week by researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope. This Hubble image shows the galaxy NGC 1961, its spiral arms reaching out into the darkness and swirling around its bright and busy center. The galaxy is located 180 million light-years away, in the constellation Camelopardalis, or the Giraffe. This lesser-known constellation is visible from the northern hemisphere and is large but faint.

This particular galaxy is notable for its active galactic nucleus, which is the very bright region at its heart. Active galactic nuclei or AGNs are targets of study because they are brighter than can be explained by the presence of stars there, with large amounts of radiation being produced as material falls into the supermassive black hole at their centers.

The galaxy NGC 1961 unfurls its gorgeous spiral arms in this newly released image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Glittering, blue regions of bright young stars dot the dusty spiral arms winding around the galaxy’s glowing center. NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton (University of Washington), R. Foley (University of California - Santa Cruz); Image processing: G. Kober (NASA Goddard/Catholic University of America)

“NGC 1961 is an intermediate spiral and an AGN, or active galactic nuclei, type of galaxy,” Hubble scientists explain. “Intermediate spirals are in between “barred” and “unbarred” spiral galaxies, meaning they don’t have a well-defined bar of stars at their centers. AGN galaxies have very bright centers that often far outshine the rest of the galaxy at certain wavelengths of light. These galaxies likely have supermassive black holes at their cores churning out bright jets and winds that shape their evolution. NGC 1961 is a fairly common type of AGN that emits low-energy-charged particles.”

Recommended Videos

Even though black holes themselves are invisible because they absorb light that comes close to them, the regions immediately around the black hole can glow brightly. As dust and gas swirl around the black hole in a structure called an accretion disk, the particles of dust and gas rub together and increase in temperature. These accretion disks can reach very high temperatures, even hotter than the surface of the sun. They are bright as they give off radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum depending on the particular environment, including visible light and X-rays.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Tech News

Georgina Torbet

Space Writer

Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…

Space

Hubble spies baby stars being born amid chaos of interacting galaxies

When two galaxies collide, the results can be destructive, with one of the galaxies ending up ripped apart, but it can also be constructive too. In the swirling masses of gas and dust pulled around by the gravitational forces of interacting galaxies, there can be bursts of star formation, creating new generations of stars. The Hubble Space Telescope recently captured one such hotbed of star formation in galaxy AM 1054-325, which has been distorted into an unusual shape due to the gravitational tugging of a nearby galaxy.

Galaxy AM 1054-325 has been distorted into an S-shape from a normal pancake-like spiral shape by the gravitational pull of a neighboring galaxy, as seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image. A consequence of this is that newborn clusters of stars form along a stretched-out tidal tail for thousands of light-years, resembling a string of pearls. NASA, ESA, STScI, Jayanne English (University of Manitoba)

Space

See 19 gorgeous face-on spiral galaxies in new James Webb data

A stunning new set of images from the James Webb Space Telescope illustrates the variety of forms that exist within spiral galaxies like our Milky Way. The collection of 19 images shows a selection of spiral galaxies seen from face-on in the near-infrared and mid-infrared wavelengths, highlighting the similarities and differences that exist across these majestic celestial objects.

“Webb’s new images are extraordinary,” said Janice Lee of the Space Telescope Science Institute, in a statement. “They’re mind-blowing even for researchers who have studied these same galaxies for decades. Bubbles and filaments are resolved down to the smallest scales ever observed, and tell a story about the star formation cycle.”

Space

Small exoplanet could be hot and steamy according to Hubble

One of the big topics in exoplanet research right now is not just finding exoplanets but also looking at their atmospheres. Tools like the James Webb Space Telescope are designed to allow researchers to look at the light coming from distant stars and see how it is filtered as it passes by exoplanets, allowing them to learn about the composition of their atmospheres. But scientists are also using older telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope for similar research -- and Hubble recently identified water vapor in an exoplanet atmosphere.

“This would be the first time that we can directly show through an atmospheric detection that these planets with water-rich atmospheres can actually exist around other stars,” said researcher Björn Benneke of the Université de Montréal in a statement. “This is an important step toward determining the prevalence and diversity of atmospheres on rocky planets."