Spiral galaxy M106: A galaxy zapped by its own black hole

Spiral galaxy M106: A galaxy zapped by its own black hole "At first, you might be overcome by the beauty of this photo. I wouldn’t blame you. It’s primarily made of images taken of M106 by the Hubble Space Telescope, but combined with images and data taken by the amazing astrophotographers Robert Gendler and Jay GaBany using ground-based telescopes.

You can see the yellowish glow of older stars in the center of the galaxy, making up its central bulge, or ‘hub’. Cascading out are two lovely spiral arms, glowing blue due to the fierce combined light of millions upon millions of hot, young, massive stars. Festooned across the arms are long strings of opaque dust clouds, blocking the blue light and appearing dark. So far, though spectacular, this is pretty mainstream spiral galaxy stuff.

Then you see those red frills, streamers of gas at odd angles to the rest of the galaxy, one each on opposite sides of the galaxy’s core. These are called its anomalous arms, because they don’t line up well at all with M106’s more obvious spiral arms. The red color is a giveaway that we’re seeing gas being warmed by an outside source; hydrogen glows at that color when excited. So what’s the engine behind that?

It turns out, that gas is being zapped by twin blasts of energy coming from material being voraciously consumed by the galaxy’s supermassive central black hole."

Get images here.