Galaxies are amazing objects whose gravity alone holds together vast collections of stars, dust, interstellar gas, stellar debris, and dark matter.
What do we see in today’s NASA image?
Today’s NASA image shows NGC 5128, better known as Centauri A. Cen A (Centaurus A) is the fifth brightest galaxy in the sky and is located about 12 million light years from Earth.
The warped shape of Cen A is due to the merger of an elliptical galaxy and a spiral galaxy, and its active galactic core has a massive black hole. The mass of this black hole is approximately 55 million times the mass of our sun. This central black hole ejects a high-speed jet visible in the radio and X-ray spectrum. Jet red filaments can be seen on the upper left side of the image.
New observations made by the Event Horizon Telescope show the brightness of the jet only at its edges. Currently, scientists are researching this unknown phenomenon.
