December 5, 1995
The cosmos is full of spectacular things: ringed planets, exploding suns, rivers of stars across the night.
The Swirling Center of NGC 4261
Birthday · December 5, 1995
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APOD published December 5, 1995. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
What evil lurks in the hearts of galaxies? The above picture by the Hubble Space Telescope of the center of the nearby galaxy NGC 4261 tells us one dramatic tale. Here gas and dust are seen swirling near this elliptical galaxy's center into what is almost certainly a massive black hole. The disk is probably what remains of a smaller galaxy that fell in hundreds of millions of years ago. Collisions like this may be a common way of creating such active galactic nuclei as quasars. Strangely, the center of this fiery whirlpool is offset from the exact center of the galaxy - for a reason that for now remains an astronomical mystery.