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| Galaxy in the southern constellation Circinus |
(CNN) -- The
nice colors of this picturesque galaxy do little to suggest the
awesome physical forces at work 13 million light years away.
At its center,
the galaxy likely contains a super-massive black hole that blows
gas out at phenomenal speeds, according to scientists who released
the Hubble Space Telescope image Thursday.
Located in
the compact nucleus of the spiral galaxy, the suspected black
hole accretes the surrounding gas and dust. It also expels gas
in a pair of powerful jets, which appear as magenta streamers
that extend toward the top of the image.
Much of the
gas in the galaxy, which lies in the southern constellation Circinus,
concentrates in two specific rings. One extends 1,300 light years
and was first observed by telescopes on the ground. Another is
only 260-light years across and was first detected by Hubble.
The larger
ring is in the plane of the galaxy's disk but extends beyond the
Hubble image. The smaller one resides inside the green disk visible
in the galactic interior.
Because the
Circinus galaxy is near the plane of our own Milky Way, it remained
hidden to astronomers behind a veil of dust until a quarter century
ago.
Led by Andrew
S. Wilson of the University of Maryland, a Hubble research team
took the composite image of the galaxy with different color filters
in April 1999.
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