The Super Power of ‘F’

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al.; Sub­mil­lime­ter: MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al.; Opti­cal: ESO/WFI

Cen­tau­rus A dis­plays the full power of a super­mas­sive black hole.

Explore this com­pos­ite image from Chan­dra X-ray Obser­va­tory and ESO’s sub­mil­lime­ter and opti­cal tele­scopes. What shapes in the gas and dust of this active galaxy do you see? Leave a com­ment below.

Cen­tau­rus A, also known as NGC 5128, is con­sid­ered by astronomers to be a pecu­liar galaxy. From Earth, the galaxy appears as a lens-like, or lentic­u­lar, galaxy with a dark band of dust across the mid­dle. The dark band of mate­r­ial block­ing our view of the cen­ter may be all that’s left of another galaxy that was gob­bled up by Cen­tau­rus A between 200 mil­lion and 700 mil­lion years ago.

Oppos­ing jets, form­ing a let­ter f, blast out of the cen­ter of the galaxy. While our eyes can­not see this jet directly, Chandra’s spe­cial X-ray tele­scope shows us jets and lobes of mate­r­ial, in blue, shot out of the cen­ter by a mas­sive black hole. Astronomers think that these jets are impor­tant for trans­port­ing mate­r­ial and energy from the cen­ter of the galaxy back out into the galaxy. The blue-colored X-ray jet shoot­ing toward the upper left extends for about 13,000 light-years from the black hole.

The galaxy is the fifth bright­est in the sky and is one of the clos­est radio galax­ies lying about 11 mil­lion light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Cen­tau­rus, the Cen­taur.

Comments

S 11-08-2010, 10:55

I like the huge blue bub­ble that the jets are push­ing against!

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