NASA's Hubble Spots an Active Black Hole

After capturing a distant star and the outburst of an infant star and many other mysterious and new things in space, now, the iconic orbital observatory has captured an interesting new image of a galaxy with an active black hole and a giant dark dust tendril, according to NASA.

NASA points out that NGC 7172 is a Seyfert galaxy, a type of galaxy that has an intensely luminous galactic nucleus at its centre fueled by the matter accreting onto the galaxy’s active black hole.

The galaxy called NGC 7172 has about 110 million light-years from the Earth from the Piscis Austrinus constellation. The image is a combination of two different records taken by the advanced camera of the Hubble Space Telescope for the Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3.

Over the 30 years since Hubble was launched in 1990, Hubble has made more than 1.5 million observations, resulting in the publication of 18,000 scientific papers ranging from dark energy to black holes and neutron stars.

As Hubble nears its end of life, NASA's Roman Nancy Grace Space Telescope, specially designed for gravitational microlensing, and the recently launched James Webb will take over the mantle to explore the universe like never before.