NASA Hubble Mission TeamGoddard Space Flight Center
Sep 18, 2024
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image includes the spiral nebula IC 4709 situated around 240 million light-years away in the southern constellation Telescopium. Hubble wonderfully catches its faint halo and swirling disk filled with stars and dust bands. The compact area at its core may be the most impressive sight. It holds an active galactic nucleus (AGN).
If IC 4709’s core simply held stars, it would not be almost as intense. Rather, it hosts a colossal great void, 65 million times more enormous than our Sun. A disk of gas spirals around and ultimately into this great void, crashing together and warming up as it spins. It reaches such heats that it discharges large amounts of electro-magnetic radiation, from infrared to noticeable to ultraviolet light and X-rays. A lane of dark dust, simply noticeable at the center of the galaxy in the image above, obscures the AGN in IC 4709. The dust lane obstructs any noticeable light emission from the nucleus itself. Hubble’s magnificent resolution, nevertheless, offers astronomers a comprehensive view of the interaction in between the rather little AGN and its host galaxy. This is vital to comprehending supermassive great voids in galaxies a lot more far-off than IC 4709, where solving such great information is not possible.
This image integrates information from 2 Hubble studies of close-by AGNs initially determined by NASA’s Swift telescope. There are prepare for Swift to gather brand-new information on these galaxies. Swift homes 3 multiwavelength telescopes, gathering information in noticeable, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray light. Its X-ray element will permit SWIFT to straight see the X-rays from IC 4709’s AGN breaking through the obscuring dust. ESA’s Euclid telescope– presently surveying the dark universe in optical and infrared light– will likewise image IC 4709 and other regional AGNs. Their information, in addition to Hubble’s, offers astronomers with complementary views throughout the electro-magnetic spectrum. Such views are crucial to totally research study and much better comprehend great voids and their impact on their host galaxies.