New Hubble image reveals intricate structure stars and dust at NGC 1097’s centre

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a spectacular image of NGC 1097, a barred spiral galaxy that lies about 48 million light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation of Fornax (The Furnace).

Shared by the European Space Agency (ESA), the image reveals the intricacy of the web of stars and dust at NGC 1097’s centre, with the long tendrils of dust picked out in a dark red hue, thanks to the telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).

📷 This NASA/ESA @HUBBLE_space Telescope image of NGC 1097, a barred spiral galaxy, reveals the intricate structure stars and dust at NGC 1097’s centre, with the tendrils of dust picked out in red 👉 https://t.co/U9RR1PRQ8J pic.twitter.com/nLxuVxX8rU

— ESA (@esa) March 14, 2022

According to ESA, colour images from telescopes are indirectly possible, however, filters can help compose images like this one.

"By sliding a filter over the aperture of an instrument like the WFC3 or ACS, only light from a very specific wavelength range is let through — one such filter used in this image is for green light around 555 nanometres. This yields a greyscale image showing only the amount of light with that wavelength. This multicolour image of NGC 1097 is composed of images using seven different filters in total," ESA explained in a blog post on Monday.

At the centre of NGC 1097 lies a supermassive black hole 100 million times the mass of our sun. The barred spiral galaxy experienced three supernovae (the violent deaths of high-mass stars) between 1992 and 2003 and has two small galaxy companions - an elliptical galaxy named NGC 1097A and a dwarf galaxy named NGC 1097B.

More details about the Hubble image of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1097 can be found here.