View of NGC 3783 and its shining center surrounding supermassive black hole through eyes of the Hubble Telescope - probably the first ever edited and published image of this galaxy from Hubble.
There is a supermassive black hole in the center of NGC 3783, a barred spiral galaxy located about 135 million light years away in the constellation Centaurus. It has a bar structure across the center and tightly-wound spiral arms. Although not shown by this classification, observers note the galaxy has a luminous inner ring surrounding the bar structure. The bright compact nucleus is active and categorized as a Seyfert 1 type. This nucleus is a strong source of X-ray emission and undergoes variations in emission across the electromagnetic spectrum.
The source of the activity in this galaxy is a rapidly rotating supermassive black hole, which is located at the core and is surrounded by an accretion disk of dust. The estimated mass of this black hole is 8.7 million solar masses. Interferometric observations yield an inner radius of about 0.52 light years for the orbiting torus of dust.
This is a member of a loose association of 47 galaxies known as the NGC 3783 group. Located at a mean distance of 117 million light-years. The NGC 3783 group has a mean velocity of about 2,903 km/s with respect to the Sun.
Image credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Rosario, David J. V.
Processing & copyright: Leo Shatz
Hubble data often suffers from noise streaks across the field. Cleaning this noise is a tedious job, semi-automated and semi-manual, but still could be rewarding at the end. The cleaning process, while being far from perfect, still results in useful images full of details.
Description source and credits: Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_3783See also
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1327/
Comments