The Hubble Telescope Captures a Dusty Galaxy That Holds a Luminous...

An image from the Hubble Space Telescope this week shows the dusty galaxy NGC 7172, located 110 million light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus (Southern Fish). .

“The dust lane that cuts its way through NGC 7172 obscures the galaxy’s luminous core, making NGC 7172 look like a normal spiral galaxy from the side,” the Hubble scientists wrote.

However, upon closer examination, the astronomers found something unexpected: “When astronomers scanned NGC 7172 across the electromagnetic spectrum, they quickly discovered that there was more to it than meets the eye: NGC 7172 is a sievert galaxy, a type of galaxy with extremely bright activity. A galactic nucleus propped up by matter accreting to a supermassive black hole.”

Hubble sees objects like this galaxy in the wavelength of visible light, which is the same as what the human eye can see, and this image was taken using two of its instruments, the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3.

To understand more about the structure of this galaxy, it was necessary to look through a different wavelength in the eighties, and astronomers observed the galaxy in the wavelength of infrared, which can look through dust clouds to observe the structures beneath it, and observations at these wavelengths revealed The bright glowing heart of the Sievert galaxy.

The Hubble image uses the data collected to study active galactic nuclei, a group that includes sieverts galaxies. Active galactic nuclei are glowing regions in the cores of galaxies that appear brighter than can be explained by the density of stars there. These regions can be so bright that they are even brighter than rest of the galaxy.