The focus of this new image share from NASA – a photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2012 – is Hercules A.
The distant galaxy, also known as 3C 348, is the bright spot in the center of the image below. Those long, red trails are plasma jets that travel about 1.5 million light-years. This is due to the massive black hole that sits in the center of 3C 348.
Image: NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)
It is an elliptical galaxy about 1000 times larger than our own Milky Way. The same goes for the black hole that formed the galaxy around; it is also about 1,000 times larger than the one in the middle of our Milky Way, with about 2.5 billion solar masses. (It is believed that many galaxies formed around supermassive black holes.)
“The galaxy is nearly a billion times more powerful in radio wavelengths than our sun, and is one of the brightest extragalactic radio sources in the entire sky,” says Hubble’s own website about 3C 348.
The plasma rays move through space near the speed of light. Hubble’s website also points out that the spherical, “ring-like structures” at the end of each ray indicate that the black hole of the distant galaxy sent them out into space more than once.
Always remember when looking at such photos that they are actually snapshots from the distant past. The Hubble team captured this image in 2012, but 3C 348 is estimated to be 2 billion light-years away. That means roughly, a photo taken today captures a scene 2 billion years ago.
It is important to maintain perspective when looking at photos of space. This single scene you are probably watching on a smartphone or tablet covers an unimaginable distance. And even though the photo itself was cropped almost a decade ago, the scene that appears in the photo took place about 2 billion years ago, at a time when the earth was still bouncing back from a mass extinction event that is changing our history as a species. significantly preceded.