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A cosmic hurricane shows its ‘eye’ in a new image of the The Hubble Space Telescope.
The spiral galaxy NGC 5728 has a power station at its center. This structure located 130 million light years from Earth in the constellation Libra belongs to a unique cosmic category thanks to its active nucleus.
NGC 5728 is a Seyfert galaxy, which means that one of its special features is the active galactic nucleus at its heart which glows with all the gas and dust that is projected around its center. black hole. Sometimes the galactic nuclei are busy and bright enough to eclipse the rest of the galaxy in visible and infrared light. But Seyfert galaxies like NGC 5728 are a special Goldilocks treat, as human instruments can still clearly see the rest of the Seyfert galaxies.
Related: Vibrating globular cluster sparkles in new Hubble Telescope photo
The European Space Agency (ESA) released this new image on Monday, September 27. According to ESA, which jointly operates the Hubble Space Telescope with NASA, the spacecraft used its Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to capture this view. Officials said in a declaration which describes the photo that even as glorious as this cosmic scene appears here, there is also a lot going on near NGC 5728 that the camera does not capture.
“As this image shows, NGC 5728 is clearly observable, and at optical and infrared wavelengths, it looks quite normal,” ESA officials wrote in the description. “It is fascinating to know that the center of the galaxy is emitting large amounts of light in parts of the electromagnetic spectrum to which WFC3 is simply not sensitive!”
It turns out that the iris of NGC 5728’s galactic “eye” could actually emit visible and infrared light that the camera would otherwise detect without the glowing dust surrounding the nucleus.
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