The only thing more impressive than this jaw-dropping image is the fact that it’s real. It’s not a painting or a computer-generated image. It’s the real deal, and it shows something that really exists, a mere 50 million light years from Earth.
So what is it?
We’re all thinking the same thing, right? Behold the open mouth of Galactus!!
But no. In reality, it’s something a little less tabloid, but every bit as awe-inspiring. You are looking at what NASA describes as a “rapidly growing supermassive black hole” located in the nearby galaxy NGC 1068. (Seriously, scientific community, can’t we come up with cooler names?) This bad boy is twice the size of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and it’s chewing up matter and belching gas into the surrounding space at a speed of one million miles an hour.
The most incredible thing about the photo is how it was made. It’s actually a composite of multiple images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Array in New Mexico, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The latter X-ray data is shown in red, visual data from Hubble is in green, and radio data from VLA is in blue. I can’t remember ever seeing a real-life black hole before.
The Chandra scientists responsible for studying the black hole believe that it’s making such profound changes to NGC 1068, that it’s altering the evolution of that galaxy.
So what happens after it chews up its own galaxy? You never can eat just one, you know. We better start building spaceships en masse and getting the heck out of this thing’s way, pronto.
“a mere 50 million miles from Earth.”
50 million light years from earth actually….
Fast Facts for NGC 1068:
Credit X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/UCSB/P.Ogle et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI/A.Capetti et al.
Scale Image is 36 arcsec on a side.
Category Quasars & Active Galaxies
Coordinates (J2000) RA 02h 42m 40.70s | Dec -00° 00′ 47.60″
Constellation Cetus
Observation Dates December 04, 2000
Observation Time 13 hours
Obs. IDs 332
Color Code Energy (X-ray: Green 0.4-0.8 keV, Blue 0.8-1.3 keV; Optical: Red)
Instrument ACIS
Also Known As M77
References P. Ogle et al. 2003 Astronomy and Astrophysics, 402, 849
Distance Estimate 50 million light years
Release Date July 09, 2003
Right you are! My bad, just a typo, honest. :) I’ll fix.
In my opinion, maybe yes or maybe no.
I really hope it dose not happen in my lifetime.
If it happens at all,
by the way I am talking bout the Interstellar Catastrophe that would result in this monster of a black hole eating our milky way galaxy, indeed we better all start hoping it’s to far away to have that kind of an effect.
But in the felid of cosmology anything can happen I am not a physicist but this know if the galaxy goes,
so dose everything we take for granted including all possibility of an escape clause should the worst come to the worst and any hope of life.
E.T Please rescue us Just joking!!!
I’ll-a throw the lumas at it and close it!
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