Hubble Telescope Snaps Supermassive Black Hole With Active Galactic Nucleus

Hubble Space Telescope, which belongs to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA), has shot a picture of a supermassive black hole that has something known as an active galactic nucleus. It is to be noted that the image was gathered by the Wide Field Camera 3 aboard the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA said that this swirling mass of celestial gas, dust, and stars is a moderately luminous spiral galaxy named ESO 021-G004, located just under 130 million light-years (764,221,300,000,000,000,000 miles) away.

“This galaxy has something known as an active galactic nucleus. While this phrase sounds complex, this simply means that astronomers measure a lot of radiation at all wavelengths coming from the center of the galaxy. This radiation is generated by material falling inward into the very central region of ESO 021-G004, and meeting the behemoth lurking there — a supermassive black hole.” NASA said in a statement.

The US space agency said, “As material falls toward this black hole it is dragged into orbit as part of an accretion disk; it becomes superheated as it swirls around and around, emitting characteristic high-energy radiation until it is eventually devoured.”

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Recently, Hubble captured a comet 2I/Borisov streaking through our solar system on its way back into interstellar space. Borisov, the only second interstellar object known to have passed through the Solar System, is one of the fastest comets ever seen.

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