This week, the Hubble Space Telescope showed us a stunning image of the spiral galaxy IC 4709, located 240 million light-years away. The image shows a brilliant core powered by a massive black hole that emits light across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from infrared to X-rays. The detailed capture is part of an extensive research effort involving several telescopes, including ESA's Euclid Telescope, to study such phenomena in local and distant galaxies.
The Hubble Space Telescope reveals a lot in this spectacular image. Hubble sees many stars here, many of which appear particularly large and bright thanks to their location near our galaxy and the characteristic diffraction patterns produced by Hubble's optical instruments.
Farther away - actually about 240 million light-years away, in the constellation Telescope South - lies the spiral galaxy IC 4709. Its swirling disk of stars and dust lanes, and the faint halo of light that surrounds it, were captured beautifully.
However, the compact, glowing region at its core may be the most striking sight: it's an active galactic nucleus (AGN). It appears particularly bright in this visible-light image captured by Hubble, but is even more powerful in other parts of the spectrum.
If IC4709's core were simply filled with stars, it wouldn't be so bright. Instead, it has a massive black hole with a mass 65 million times that of the sun. A disk of gas swirls around and eventually into the black hole, where the gas knocks together and heats up as it spins. It reaches temperatures so high that it emits vast amounts of electromagnetic radiation, from infrared to visible light to ultraviolet and beyond -- including, in this case, X-rays.
To understand this brilliant astrophysical phenomenon, it is necessary to study the entire spectrum of its emissions. The Hubble Space Telescope's high-resolution view not only allows for the collection of large amounts of light from the AGN's optical emission, but also allows for a detailed study of the interactions between this rather small AGN and its host galaxy.
This image, like last week's image, contains data from two Hubble surveys of nearby AGNs discovered by the Swift X-ray/UV telescope. In addition to more Swift data and data from Hubble, ESA's Euclid telescope, which is currently surveying the dark universe in infrared light, will also take images of IC4709 and other local AGNs.
Close black holes like these can help us understand black holes that exist in the most distant galaxies, and the complementary use of space telescopes across the electromagnetic spectrum is key to fully studying these black holes.
Compiled from /ScitechDaily