File:The Near Vicinity of the Black Hole at the Core of Galaxy NGC 4261 - Artist Concept (1995-47-371).jpg

Captions

Captions

This is an illustration of how the night sky might look to a dweller in the core of galaxy NGC 4261, which harbors an 800-light-year-wide disk of dust and 1.2 billion-solar-mass black hole.

Summary edit

Description
English: This is an illustration of how the night sky might look to a dweller in the core of galaxy NGC 4261, which harbors an 800-light-year-wide disk of dust and 1.2 billion-solar-mass black hole. This imaginary view is from a hypothetical planet inside the dust dusk, looking toward the black hole. The black hole's white-hot glow from super-heated gas is reddened by intervening dust. A "lighthouse beam" from the hot accretion disk around the black hole, along with invisible radio jets, radiates above and below the hole at right angles to the dark dust disk encircling the hole. This dark, dusty disk bisects the sky, blocking out light from the star behind it, and reddening starlight traveling near it by optical scattering - much in the same way the sunlight turns red at sunset by scatter from dust in our atmosphere. The imaginary planet, and surrounding stars, are destined to be swallowed by the black hole, and material in the disk spirals into its gravitational abyss.
Date 4 December 1995, 11:30:00 (upload date)
Source The Near Vicinity of the Black Hole at the Core of Galaxy NGC 4261 - Artist Concept
Author Illustration by: J. Gitlin (Space Telescope Science Institute)
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Keywords
InfoField
Galaxies; Black Holes; Active Galaxies/Quasars

Licensing edit

Public domain This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material. This license does not apply if ESA material created after 2008 or source material from other organizations is in use.
The material was created for NASA by Space Telescope Science Institute under Contract NAS5-26555, or for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre. Copyright statement at hubblesite.org or 2008 copyright statement at spacetelescope.org.
For material created by the European Space Agency on the spacetelescope.org site since 2009, use the {{ESA-Hubble}} tag.

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current13:36, 8 May 2024Thumbnail for version as of 13:36, 8 May 2024750 × 600 (46 KB)OptimusPrimeBot (talk | contribs)#Spacemedia - Upload of https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01EVVFZT5SKDCHHARPKFYDNJ86.jpg via Commons:Spacemedia