File:"X" Structure at Core of Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) (1992-17-68).tiff

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Captions

Captions

This image of the core of the nearby spiral galaxy M51, taken with the Wide Field Planetary camera (in PC mode) on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows a striking , dark "X" silhouetted across the galaxy's nucleus.

Summary

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Description
English: This image of the core of the nearby spiral galaxy M51, taken with the Wide Field Planetary camera (in PC mode) on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows a striking , dark "X" silhouetted across the galaxy's nucleus. The "X" is due to absorption by dust and marks the exact position of a black hole which may have a mass equivalent to one-million stars like the sun. The darkest bar may be an edge-on dust ring which is 100 light-years in diameter. The edge-on torus not only hides the black hole and accretion disk from being viewed directly from earth, but also determines the axis of a jet of high-speed plasma and confines radiation from the accretion disk to a pair of oppositely directed cones of light, which ionize gas caught in their beam. The second bar of the "X" could be a second disk seen edge on, or possibly rotating gas and dust in MS1 intersecting with the jets and ionization cones. The size of the image is 1100 light-years.
Date 8 June 1992, 13:30:00 (upload date)
Source "X" Structure at Core of Whirlpool Galaxy (M51)
Author Credit: H. Ford (JHU/STScI), the Faint Object Spectrograph IDT, and NASA
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Licensing

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Public domain
This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material. This license does not apply if ESA material created after 2008 or source material from other organizations is in use.

The material was created for NASA by Space Telescope Science Institute under Contract NAS5-26555, or for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre. Copyright statement at hubblesite.org or 2008 copyright statement at spacetelescope.org.

For material created by the European Space Agency on the spacetelescope.org site since 2009, use the {{ESA-Hubble}} tag.

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current20:45, 27 November 2023Thumbnail for version as of 20:45, 27 November 20232,169 × 2,025 (7.79 MB)OptimusPrimeBot (talk | contribs)#Spacemedia - Upload of https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01EVTB5MBTCHQB2P85QV21CADT.tif via Commons:Spacemedia

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