Amazing Photo Taken from the Hubble Space Telescope

Pretty cool, huh?

Here’s the scoop from physics professor Dr. Eric Perlman:

“This is the spiral galaxy NGC 5793, which is over 150 million light-years away.  It is what’s called a Seyfert galaxy, with an intensely bright, active nucleus that is powered by the accretion of matter onto a supermassive black hole that is many millions of times the Sun’s mass.  The galaxy is also of interest because of the large amount of dust, which you can see in two lanes in the spiral disk, which we see nearly edge-on.  I was the lead investigator on the Hubble observations of NGC 5793, which are shown in the image. An interesting fact about this image, however, is that the actual processing was done by an amateur, Judy Schmidt, in the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures contest run by ESA.”

For more info on this photo, click here.