a gorgeous image from the spitzer space telescope was released last week. spitzer detects infrared energy (heat) and therefore allows us to see areas of the universe that optical telescopes cannot observe because they are blocked by interstellar clouds of dust & gas.
this picture is of the spiral galaxy NGC 1097 which lies about 50 million light years away. the "eye" in the center is a supermassive black hole, estimated to be 100 million times the mass of our sun. in comparison, the one at the center of the milky way is a wee 4 million solar masses. of course, the black hole above is invisible, but the very bright point of light in the center is probably gas and dust swirling around and burning up as it makes its final plunge.
this black hole is surrounded by a ring of star formation thousands of light years across, which you can see as that perfect circle of white light in the middle. material from the bar — the long lines of gas and dust stretching across the middle of the galaxy — is feeding that ring, and stars there are being born in prodigious numbers.
even if there was no life in NGC 1097 fifty million years ago, when the heat we are seeing left, with billions of stars and billions of planets, perhaps this eye now has eyes looking back at us...
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