NGC 1068 and the X-Ray Flashlight

NGC 1068 and the X-Ray Flashlight



At night,tilting a flashlight up under your chin hides theglowing bulb from the direct view of your friends.Light from the bulb still reflects from your face though, and cangive you a startling appearance SpiralGalaxy NGC 1068may be playing a similar trick on cosmic scale,hiding a central powerful source of x-rays -- likely supermassive black hole -- from direct view X-rays arestill scattered into our line-of-sightthough, by a dense torus of material surrounding the black hole The scenario issupported by x-ray data from th Chandra Observatory combined with a Hubble SpaceTelescope optical image i thisfalse-color composite picture.Optical data in red shows spiral structure across NGC 1068'sinner 7 thousand light-years with the x-ray data overlaid in blueand green.A hot wind of gas streaming from the galaxy's coreis seen as the broad swath of x-ray emission while materia lit upby the hidden black hole source is within the centralcloud of more intense x-rays Also well knownas M77, NGC 1068 lies a mere 50 millionlight-years away toward the constellation Cetus.