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Hubble Provides Multiple Views of How to Feed a Black Hole (PRC98-14)  
 
PRC98-14b 14 May, 1998  

CENTAURUS A: THE INSIDE STORY 

Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to probe the core of the nearest active galaxy to Earth, Centaurus A. 
 
 

Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer was used to peer past the dust to discover a tilted disk of hot gas at the galaxy's center (white bar running diagonally across image center). This 130 light-year diameter disk encircles a suspected black hole which may be one billion times the mass of our Sun. The disk feeds material to presumably an inner, unresolved accretion disk that is made up of gas entrapped by the black hole. The red blobs near the disk are glowing gas clouds which have been heated up and ionized by the powerful radiation from the active nucleus.

The false-color NICMOS image was taken on Aug. 11, 1997 at a wavelength of 1.87 microns ("Paschen alpha"), characteristic of ionized Hydrogen. 

Centaurus A (NGC 5128) Fast Facts 

Right Ascension: 13 : 25.5 (hours : minutes)
Declination: -43 : 01 (degrees : minutes)
Apparent Magnitude: 7.0 
Apparent Diameter: 18.2 (arc minutes)
Distance: 10 million light-years
Constellation: Centaurus (southern sky)

Credit: E.J. Schreier, (STScI) and NASA 

Team members are: Ethan J. Schreier, Alessandro Marconi, 
David J. Axon, Nicola Caon, Duccio Macchetto ( STScI), 
Alessandro Capetti - (Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino, Italy), 
James H. Hough, Stuart Young ( University of Hertfordshire, UK), and 
Chris Packham (Isaac Newton Group, Islas Canarias, SPAIN)