The Hubble Space Telescope captured quite the shot of a cosmic hurricane!
The spiral galaxy dubbed NGC 5728 unfolded right before the telescope’s eyes, showing its best traits. NASA has just released the picture, and it kind of looks like something peculiar yet familiar.
Curious to find out more?
The Celestial Eye of a Cosmic Hurricane
Hubble succeeded in taking a picture of NGC 5728, a galaxy 130 million light-years from Earth. The structure is also located in the constellation Libra and is part of a unique cosmic category with an active core.
NGC 5728 is a Seyfert galaxy. But what does this mean?
Such galaxies shine powerfully thanks to all the dust and gas cast around its central black hole. Yes, a black hole! Quite intriguing, right? And that’s not all.
Sometimes those cores could become busy and shiny enough to outshine the rest of the galaxy both in infrared and visible light. But NGC 5728 can do more than that, becoming a real Goldilocks. The reason?
According to scientists, human instruments can view the rest of the galaxy clearly even if it has a powerhouse at its core! Check out Hubble’s photo of it below:
As you can notice, there’s an ‘eye’ right in the center of NGC 5728. You can also see how the rest of the galaxy is still visible.
Behind Hubble’s Eyes
According to ESA (the European Space Agency), Hubble used its WFC3 (Wide Field Camera 3) to shoot such a picture. Scientists stated that the picture reveals essential data, and there is more going on near NGC 5728 that (unfortunately) Hubble can’t see it.
The space agency jointly operates the telescope with NASA.
ESA officials said:
“[…] It is fascinating to know that the galaxy’s centre is emitting vast amounts of light in parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that WFC3 just isn’t sesnsitive to!”
Future missions and instruments will surely be capable of more and capture a lot more data!