FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Gaze Deeply Into the Beautiful Cosmic Barf of Centaurus A

Up close and personal with our closest galactic neighbor.

Centaurus A is our active closest galactic neighbor at only 11 million light-years away, give or take. The galaxy itself is around 60,000 light-years across (the Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across) making it approximately "big as shit."

Centaurus A also happens to be a rather weird galaxy, which is largely responsible for its photogenic nature. It's thought to be the result of two relatively normal galaxies colliding, leaving behind a brew of young blue star clusters, pinkish star-forming regions, and dark lanes of dust. At the center is a black hole with around one billion times the mass of our own Sun. As this central hole chews through left over cosmic debris, it emits a radiant waterfall of radio, X-ray, and gamma-ray energy.

The image itself, a recent NASA astronomy image of the day, is actually a composite of images drawn from the Hubble Legacy Archive, the European Southern Observatories, and data from amateur astronomers and space photographers. Credit for the image assembly and processing goes to Robert Gendler and Roberto Colombari.