Images Credit & Copyright: NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ESO’s ALMA Observatory.
At a distance of 32 million light years, this galaxy in the southern constellation of Dorado (The Dolphinfish) is a beautiful spiral galaxy with an outer ring of brilliant blue star formation and beautifully detailed dust lanes streaming inward toward the nucleus.
You may notice however, that the nucleus itself is much brighter than the dull yellow colors that we see most of the time. That’s because this galaxy is a Seyfert galaxy. I know, what’s that mean right? A Seyfert galaxy (Named for American astronomer Carl Seyfert) is a galaxy with a bright, active nucleus or in short; it’s a supermassive black hole with a bright accretion disk of material around it. This disk produces bright sources of electromagnetic radiation that in many circumstances can’t be seen in visible light.
Taking a step in from the wide Hubble image we take a closer look at that active galactic nuclei from the one and only Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the Atacama Desert of Chile. Well, this is actually a combined image of Hubble data with ALMA data laid over it showing even more data and revealing a tiny 150 light year-long jet of material outflowing from the supermassive black hole.
NAME: NGC 1433.
WHAT IS IT?: Spiral galaxy.
HOW FAR AWAY IS IT?: 32 million light years.
HOW BIG IS IT?: Roughly 100,000 light years in diameter.
APPARENT MAGNITUDE: 9.9.
WHERE IS IT? (General): Constellation Dorado (The Dolphinfish).
WHERE IS IT? (Exact RA/DEC J2000): RA 03h 42m 01.553s / DEC −47° 13′ 19.49″.
ESA Space Telescope (Hubble) page for the first image: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1427a/
ESO ALMA page for the second image: http://www.almaobservatory.org/en/visuals/images/?g2_itemId=5633
