Spiral Galaxy UGC 3478: A Supermassive Black Hole in its Bright Core | Hubble

Spiral Galaxy UGC 3478: A Supermassive Black Hole in its Bright Core | Hubble

Looking past its long spiral arms filled with stars and the dark threads of dust crossing it, your eye might be caught by the shining point at the center of UGC 3478, the spiral galaxy starring in this Hubble picture. This point is the galaxy’s nucleus—it is a growing giant black hole that astronomers call an active galactic nucleus, or AGN.

Distance: 128 million light years

UGC 3478, located in the constellation Camelopardalis, is known as a Seyfert galaxy. This is a type of galaxy with an AGN at its core. Like all such “active galaxies”, the brightness that you see hides a supermassive black hole at the center. A disc of gas spirals into this black hole, and as the material crashes together and heats up, it emits very strong radiation. The spectrum of this radiation includes hard X-ray emission. This clearly marks it out from the stars within the galaxy. Despite the strong brightness of the compact central region, we can still clearly see the disc of the galaxy around it, making UGC 3478 a Seyfert galaxy.

Many active galaxies are known to astronomers at vast distances from Earth, thanks to the great brightness of their nuclei highlighting them next to other, dimmer galaxies. At 128 million light-years from Earth, UGC 3478 is positively neighborly to us. The data used to make this image comes from a Hubble survey of nearby powerful AGNs found in relatively high-energy X-rays, like this one. Astronomers hope to understand how the galaxies interact with the supermassive black holes at their cores.

Image Description: A spiral galaxy, with two glowing spiral arms. They are filled with thin lines of dark dust, and surrounded by a faint cloud. One arm stretches further from the galaxy than the other. The point at the center of the spiral is particularly bright. It is on a black background, mostly empty, except for distant galaxies and a few bright stars in the foreground.

Credit: European Space Agency/Hubble & NASA, M. Koss, A. Barth

Release Date: Aug. 26, 2024

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